The surprisingly generous <A HREF="http://www.sciam.com">Scientific American website</A> has a brief

On Reagan's birthday, the anti-tax firebrand Grover Norquist was busy promoting his latest Reagan-related project. (His last one was the successful effort to rename Washington National Airport Ronald Reagan National Airport. It used to be unusual, except in places like Stalingrad and Ciudad Trujillo, for important localities to be named after living politicians.) Norquist wants to replace the portrait of Alexander Hamilton on the ten-dollar bill with a portrait of Ronald Reagan. "Hamilton was a great American," Norquist jauntily told the <I>Times</I>. "But it's time to move on."

Blair about the American attitude to this

neat stuff, but I was struck at how blatantly pro-American it was.

China coast, a 1960s era American built Lockheed

The Americans, utilizing the infrequently seen combat tactic of straight

Oh, and <a href="http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,107753,00.html">George Bush 2's graceless hand</a> brings more tension with China. Or as <a href="http://onion.com">the Onion</a> headline put it "First Chapter In History Of Sino-American War Of 2011 Already Written"

NASA's <A HREF="http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/GSFC/EARTH/imaging/landsat.htm">Great Zooms from Space</A> is really cool (it's been kicking around <a href="http://slashdot.org">slashdot</a> and <a href="http://camworld.com">camworld</a>.) Movies that start from space and end up zoomed in on an American city. San Francisco is especially good, because of the way it involves the coast. Orlando's pretty good too-- I'm trying to figure out if it's the Epcot ball or what there at maximum zoom.

seaplane carrying American missionaries.<br>

<a href="http://www.americanatheist.org/win98-99/T2/silverman.html">Interview with Douglas Adams</a> on Atheism. Interesting points on the distinctions between Atheism and Agnosticism.

Which headlines did not appear in an American newspaper?<br>

Here Zimran Ahmed, a Packistani, gives some details on <a href="http://mailpages.scripting.com/2001/09/12">the Middle East view of American foreign policy</a>. For a certian perspective, we're the sponsors

John Sawers thought that this one on <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,551036,00.html">how Americans can't see why others don't see them as the good guys</a> was

On Tuesday, some Arab maniacs will hijack the American Airlines plane<br>

<a href="http://www.well.com/~rab/afghan.html">Afghani-American writer</a>

Of course, not to be out done, we Americans need a car

And what vehicle is more American than an SUV? These facts, combined with a transportation-vacuum created by people's reluctance to fly, might help revitalize America's struggling manufacturing sector...

it's <a href="http://www.intercorr.com/roach.htm">Robo-Roach</a>, the Remote Controlled insect! "Researchers use only the american cockroach (Perplaneta americana) because it is bigger and hardier than most other species"-- take that all you other countries! We scoff at your puny roaches.

We really are a challenge. And also because the modern technological world is interpreted through an American prism. We've always represented the future. And our popular culture has the ability to suck up their new emerging middle classes -- in Egypt and other Islamic and developing countries -- because it's informal, it's not aristocratic -- it's jeans, computers, music. Because it's an informal culture, anyone can join it, and it becomes very enticing. And that's the threat. They hate us, but it's a type of respect.

to help you." They said, "can you get us some American flags?" "We would

When the average American can point out Tajikistan, Pakistan, Russia, China,

terminal illness, NPR's <a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/">This

American Life</a>, Episode 188.

I'm drinking my coffee from a mug with Grant Wood's "American Gothic" on it.

that American Taliban punk (click here for his <a href="http://groups.google.com/groups?as_uauthors=doodoo@hooked.net&hl=en">posts to Usenet from 1997</a> ... doodoo@hooked.net??) predicting

Salon talks with the author of the book about <a href="http://www.salon.com/books/int/2001/12/13/dickson/index.html">Sputnik's effect on America</a>. Man, 1957 was a bad year...this guy reels of so many details that have been generally lost in the mists of American pop culture short term memory. (Salon had a Premium-subscription interview with Kurt Vonnegut the other day that wasn't as good as I would have hoped.)

There are 27O million Americans. The US is filthy

American Beauty,

American Psycho,

American Pie,

The animation is well nigh non-existent, and the "Please note: Holding the CTRL/COMMAND key down for continuous fire will cause the game to malfunction." doesn't bode well either. (Incidentally, PT Barnum was a trustee of Tufts, which is why his famous elephant is the mascot. He promised his remains to both Tufts and the American Museum of Natural History...they got the skeleton, we got the skin, but it was turned into ashes during a fire in the 1970s. More of the <a href="http://ase.tufts.edu/athletics/history.html">story here</a>.)

USA! USA! The Fox pre-game show, with rap stars, former presidents, the patriotic and commercial mixed--the flashing FREEDOM! sign next to the BUD LIGHT sign--was quintessentially American. That is, poignant and ridiculously excessive at the same time. TMQ thought two things: <br>

At one point during the 1980s, American Pop Culture almost achieved critical mass in California. The resulting explosion would have destroyed the "right coast", leaving only a smoldering ruin of mediagenic debris. A picture of that event can is displayed below: <div align="center">

I just love the saga of the <a href="http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/state/article/0,1299,DRMN_21_1026337,00.html">Fightin' Whities</a>. I'm not sure if it's going to be effective as a point-making tactic...I think a lot of white guys will just think it's kind of a cool joke and not get that some Native Americans might be offended by certain team mascots.

<a href="http://www.reuters.com/news_article.jhtml?type=topnews&StoryID=957520">Iran's Khatami Tells U.S. to Stop Insults</a>..."If they abandon their threats and insulting language and we sense their goodwill then dialogue would be possible. American politicians should first learn to speak politely." This being the nation that calls us the "Great Satan" and uses hatred of us as a rallying point? Sheesh!

Back in the day, before the Internet ran smack dab into American popculture,

William Langewiesche in <a href="http://theatlantic.com">The Atlantic Monthly's</a> "American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center"

Insightful Slate <a href="http://slate.msn.com/?id=2066297&&entry=2067704">Joe Klein article</a> on how the Europeans see us (and to a lesser extent, how we see them). Interesting excerpt: "The American identity can be summarized in a single polling question: We are the only country in the world where a majority has consistently believed--with the exception of a few years in the late 1970s--that next year will be better." That's a pretty amazing sentiment to have maintained even through Vietnam and the Cold War. He also points out that we probably wouldn't be building quite the level of global resentment we are if Gore was in the whitehouse (frickin' electoral college...I remember some essay way back when saying "it was like the electoral college...it worked ok as long as you didn't think about it too much"-- how wrong that essay was!<br>

I've been thinking that it's time to admit some cultures are broken, and this admission might permit some unpleasant things that we have to. The American culture is certainly broken, we're incredibly full of ourselves and want to dictate policy to the rest of the world. Arab culture is broken in many ways, including some that are dangerous to the rest of the world, and unfortunately I think that's going to justify some level of discrimination against members of it. If I had to guess I'd say the Europeans have it the least broken, but I'm not sure.

Disturbing and thought provoking article "<a href="http://www.worldandi.com/public/2001/October/sax.html">The Feminization of American Culture</a>", discussing how new chemicals in the environment may be acting as "synthetic female hormone" and possibly be somewhat responsible for changes in developed countries like decreased sperm count for males, younger onset of puberty in females, and even a general shift in cultural attitudes.<br><br>

<a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/issue_julyaug_2002/wallerstein.html">The Eagle Has Crash Landed</a> from Foreign Policy magazine about the decline of the United States, from Vietnam on. It takes some positions that make a lot of sense, others that I'm not sure I accept. (Like viewing both World Wars as a single general conflict for power between the United States and Germany.) I sense a certain agenda on behalf of the author, but besides the general point against the hawks who want us to "Attaq Iraq" (and I still can't get my head around the public indifference to this upcoming event) I'm not sure what it is. And you have to keep perspective, the loss of American power isn't the same as the nation in ruins, though our relations with the rest of the world can help determine if we go through something more like the Soviet Union or like the United Kingdom.<br><br>

<a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/PEstory/TGAM/20020803/RVGATS/Arts/thearts/thearts_temp/4/4/38/">this theory on the title character's origins</a>. The book was about the only assigned reading in high school English that I didn't get through. Even now, there's something about the prose style that I find very hard to digest...I'm amazed the book was as popular and influential as it was. Not helping is knowledge of this other <a href="http://dir.salon.com/books/feature/2000/08/09/gatsby/index.html">theory that Gatsby is black</a>, passing as white. Especially given all the African-American literature I read in college (best way to get credit for both the English half of my double major as well as "World Culture"), it's going to be hard to read the book without constantly hunting for evidence for this admittedly fringe theory.

I finished this book, the one assigned reading I didn't get through in high school. I think it helps to have lived through chasing a doomed romance. Also to know people kind of like Tom Buchanan. I know Charles Shulz like to reference the stip sometimes (maybe because it's such a classic American work, maybe because he and Fitzgerald share a hometown) and I wish I could locate some examples of that.

the British or Americans.<br>

the British or Americans.<br>

attacks than the British or Americans.<br>

fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.<br>

and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.<br>

Roy Blount Jr., from American Heritage magazine having experts pick the <a href="http://www.americanheritage.com/AMHER/2002/05/over-under.shtml">most overrated and underrated things</a> in their categories of expertise, from "Amendments to the Constitution" to "World War II Generals".

Europeans don't just hate Americans. They do a pretty good job of

Wired on <a href="http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,55799,00.html">Americanization Lessons</a> for workers in call centers in India. Man, the concept of a well-educated workforce with salaries so low makes me nervous. I hope their standard wages go up before global integration becomes easier than it is now. Software-Industry-wise, I've heard that although it seems like a tremendous bargain for a US company to outsource with offshore centers, in the long run, the costs are about the same. Given my experience with about 2/3 of the Indian consultants I've worked with, that doesn't surprise me. Still, a number of jobs'll be lost while companies figure out if it's a good deal or not.

the <a href="http://www.aei.org/eo/eofront.htm">American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research</a> page came up. Just browsing the headlines for the past 7 or so years makes for some interesting reading.

The most in-depth <a href="http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~golder/dialect/maps.php">American dialect survey</a> I've seen, from age-old questions like "is it a <A href="http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~golder/dialect/staticmaps/q_64.html">sub, hoagie, hero, or grinder</a>"/"<a href="http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~golder/dialect/staticmaps/q_105.html">soda, pop, tonic, or coke</a>" to more obscure ones like

<a href="http://www.salon.com/books/int/2002/11/06/hertsgaard/index.html">Salon interview about how the rest of the world views the USA</a>. Like our pop-culture, hate our politics, but most places have a more sophisticated view of us than we give them credit for. (In fact Hertsgaard contends that it's the Americans with the really over-simplified view.)

and logos</a>) What I really liked was their <a href="http://www.nfleurope.com/play/guidenew1.html">Beginner's Guide to American Football</a>, trying to explain and justify the dang thing.<br><br>

<a href="http://www.kollaboration.org/index.htm">Kollaboration</a>, a Korean-American talent show.

<a href="http://www.4c.com.br/v_rf_woods_i.htm">best loved American poems</a> might just be about a guy stopping to take a leak.

<li>I first heard about the simulation <a href="http://alife.fusebox.com/planet_wator.html">Wa-Tor</a> in a Scientific American "Computer Recreations" column. The idea is a grid (which could map onto a torus-shaped planet so the "wrap around" made sense) with shark predators and fish prey. Sharks eat too many fish, the fish population dies out, the sharks starve, the fish come back, lather rinse repeat.

You know, I'm still always a little startled when I hear about the ministers and other believers who are Christian but don't take everything about the Bible literally. (I think a lot of Anglicans are like that, according to one survey I heard about, and the preacher in the blog mentions that's one of the things he learned about Bible scholars in his pre-seminary schooling.) I think the church in America does itself a disservice with its Fundamentalist "incorruptable and literally true" reading of its holy book. I think that's certainly something that drove me from my faith. On the other hand, from a meme point of view, maybe "the American church" is doing better for itself with this kind of simple, easy to understand, take-it-or-leave-it belief. After all, people don't seem to be getting much more rational, or equipped to judge the scientific likelihood of some of the claims of the bible.

<a href="http://unamerican.com/">unamerican.com</a>

I think the American People--I hope the American--I don't think,

let me--I hope the American people trust me.

American Pie 2,

Wet Hot American Summer,

"[This news report about American military pilots being given amphetamines]

<a href="http://www.lib.ucdavis.edu/exhibits/food/index.html">America the Bountiful</a>, "Classic American Food from Antiquity to the Space Age". Neat perspective.

<A href="http://www.computeruser.com/resources/dictionary/emoticons.html">American Emoticon Dictionaries</a> can be huge, but people tend to stick with :-) :-D :-/ and :-P (Software that automatically translates these into their yellow cartoon equivalents is a really dumb and overplayed idea, taking away the charm of the concept...and AOL Instant Messenger gets it wrong-- :-D is not big toothy smile, it's "laugh"...duh.)

Man, Middle Class Americans are such wusses. Folks in Iraq have to worry about the barrages of cruise missiles that are likely to be headed in their general direction soon, folks in Israel (Israeli and Palestinean alike) are in daily fear of getting blow'd up, folks all over the world just don't know where their next meal is coming from, past generations of Americans (including my younger self) had much bigger fears about nuclear armegeddon, and I'm mostly worried about having a job that pays enough to pay my mortgage and keeps me sufficiently entertained.

There's something profoundly immoral about financing tax breaks for today's wealthiest Americans by borrowing money from the unborn.

"[Oprah] is so fundamental to Ameri-think. She's all about self-esteem and perfectibility and viewing yourself as a work in progress. The whole psychology of that is that you must believe that A) improvement is possible and B) that it is actually possible to get it right. You are your own best project. And because we're Americans we somehow think that everyone else in the world thinks that way too, and of course, nothing can be further from the truth. They don't."

Foreign Affairs on <a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20030101faessay10219-p0/michael-scott-doran/palestine-iraq-and-american-strategy.html">Palestine, Iraq, and American Strategy</a>. The core idea is that the Palestinean issue is a powerful symbol used in Middle East politics, and an important one, but the answer isn't "deal with Palestine first". Another interesting but scary article: <a href="http://www.evworld.com/databases/storybuilder.cfm?storyid=490">Is The Currency Oil is Traded In</a> the real reason for this whole Iraq thing? Iraq made out like bandits by switching to the Euro before it started its recent huge gains against the dollar. If OPEC followed suit en masse, the result could be a dollar devaluation mess on a third world scale.<br><br>

Fiscal prudence? The keystone of today's 'conservative' agenda is a dedication to tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, even though doing so will increase the deficit. That's short-term thinking at its worst. Because of those tax breaks, the faltering economy and the war on terrorism, some economists estimate we'll have deficits of $300 billion a year for the foreseeable future. The next generation of Americans will bear the burden of that debt.

I'm mad about being old and I'm mad about being American. Apart from that, OK.

Currently, I understand that "mad about being American" part.

I guess that's not the kind of work I really want be doing anyway, that big system, well specified stuff, that I'd like to gear myself more at the "boutiquey" kind of thing, but its a disturbing trend. The danger is if we farm out too much to the third world, wages for both will slowly trend towards the mean, and we'll end up looking a lot more third world ourselves. (Yeesh, I never would have thought I was gonna be espousing such a "So Buy American"

I loathe the expression 'What makes him tick?' It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.

--American Soldiers through the years, a <a href="http://www.cellar.org/showthread.php?s=f767588a925e19c02fbe87e1ce3a4205&threadid=2881">cellar.org Image of the Day</a>, from a previous pro-war demonstration in Denver.

Back when I was around 6 or so, my dad brought me this rock he had found on a walk. We were living in Salamanca, NY, near the Seneca nation of Indians, and we thought the imprints on it might be American Indian related. The folks at the Seneca Museum said no, it was likely more a fossil of old life. I never quite believed it, but now that I think about it, It would be a kind of random thing for an Indian to inscribe, even a group that used bows to hunt.

Even the promised 1.4 million jobs in 18 months that the plan should bring is <b>below average</b> job growth. Bush's might be the first presidency since Hoover where the American economy lost jobs...I know that's after a runup bubble (where taxes were raised on the highest earners and we added 5 million jobs in a year and a half...though maybe that was all the magic power of the Internet) but still, the fact is the adminstration doesn't know how to fix it.

Also, Fred Kaplan <A href="http://slate.msn.com/id/2082499/">analyzes Al Franken's jibe</a> at Paul Wolfowitz, "Clinton's military did pretty well in Iraq, huh?" Saying yes, in some ways it was Clinton's Legacy in the army--but much R+D is pretty much independent of the presidential office, and Clinton really was reluctant to put <i>any</i> American soldiers at risk. (Of course that was pre-9/11. I think that might have made a difference for any administration.)<br>

Covers of American Comic Books</a>. Click on each one for a larger image and a description of why it was chosen. Some interesting choices there, with a big emphasis on some of the patriotic covers that came out during World War II. The <a href="http://web2.chicagonet.net/~atlas/cover3.htm">page of rejects</a> is kind of amusing, no commentary though, I suppose most of them speak for themselves.

This American Life talked about the Hartman Value Profile which you <a href="http://www.cs.uh.edu/%7est5ba/HVP/page1-Introduction_to_HVP.html">can take online</a> though the results aren't the easiest things to grasp.

<li>In Germany Mo and I are going to Veronika's wedding. Veronika and I went out when she was a foreign exchange student in Cleveland. I think to some Americans she reads a little cold, maybe a bit of that German reserve, but when she's in love, man, she just melts. I saw that last time we visted her and her soon to be husband, in 2000. It's cool to see.

<li>American coins generally aren't "fair" with a 50/50 chance of landing either way. When given the choice, always pick "tails". Seriously. I did this all through darts season, it was heads like once or twice, and tails about 8 or 9 times.

<a href="http://unamerican.com">unamerican.com</a>

On the same lines, is it possible that the incredible amounts of caffeine ingested by American society might also be a contributing factor in the uprise of ADD/ADHD? It just seems like a possiblity to me.<br>

Feh. The trivia for the film on IMDB mentions that in UK and Australia, they have an alternate credits featuring fake interviews with Daniel Cleaver, Mark's parents and Bridget's boss. That sounds much cooler and less corny (not too mention less pedophiliariffic) than what the American audience got stuck with.

Back from the end of March, a Slate.com Explainer talks about <a href="http://slate.msn.com/id/2080817/">Why Is Iraqi Anti-Aircraft Fire Visible on TV?</a>...the answer is, of course, tracers put in to make aiming easier, but mentions that during the Cold War, they've started color coding 'em, so people know who's shooting at whom: "In Vietnam, North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong tracers were designed to leave green trails while American and South Vietnamese tracers were designed to leave red ones. The New York Times reports that the color scheme is similar in Gulf War II: Americans, red; Iraqis, green."<br><br>

I'm pretty sure that <a href="http://sciplus.com">American Science & Surplus</a> is the same company that put out a catalog I loved so much in high school, and their website is even cooler. Here's a bit of

You know, between this crossdressing stuff, that whole "sex with a virgin will cure AIDS" idea, and the whole "the Liberians will lay down there arms as soon as the Americans or other peace keepers move in, but we just can't bring ourselves to do it on our own"...I dunno, they don't seem like the most sophisticated warrior males in the world.

<a href="http://www.activehistory.co.uk/head2head/hitler/activity.htm">Interview Adolf Hitler</a> is an innovative teaching tool...you type questions in, and get responses back from the portrait of Adolph Hitler. As they found out on the <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/27832">metafilter discussion</a> where I got the link, the technology is probably little more than keyword recognition, where certain words trigger certain responses, but still, it's reasonably convincing. I think it makes sense that this was made in the UK; it would be too controversial for most American eduction technologists to touch. In particular, it doesn't spoonfeed the student lines like "Hey, I'm so evil! Did I mention I'm evil?"--its answers are like those of a man who is convinced of his cause, and can make persuasive arguments about it. (Though people on mefi argue that Hitler was probably not an atheist as this site claims, and he does drop some late-20th century buzzwords like "basic human dignity".)

Amusing for lke 2 or 3 clicks, <A href="http://www.ftrain.com/cgi-bin/l_operation.cgi?num_ops=20">American Military Operation Name Generating Device</a> comes up with those odd namepair titles given to our military operations.

can't put up highways signs, so you end up going on these fairly unlabeled backwoods roads for a while, 'til finally these giant buildings spring up like the Star Destroyer at the start of the first Star Wars movie. The styling is kind of odd, as if Epcot center had a "Native American" section in its international section. <br><br>

Slate.com on <a href="http://slate.msn.com/id/2089142/">how American parents also have a preference for sons over daughters</a>, looking at marriage and divorce rates. The article, and the report it based, decline to speculate why that is, but my theory is this: men just don't how to relate to little girls. I think few would argue that the mother-child bond isn't stronger than the father-child bond. Therefore I'd guess that a lot of these breakups and what not happen because men just aren't emotionally in tune enough with young women, they just don't know what to do.<br><br>

"your American internal visa (formerly known as a 'driver's license')". He's got a point, for what it's worth.

Two lectures have a big focus on synesthaesia, where some people have their brain crosswired so that unrelated concepts trigger each other; most strikingly, number shapes that trigger colors so strongly that the person afflicted can much more easily pick out a shape made of just those numbers out of a field of roughly similar looking numbers, because they stand out in color. (Here's a <a href="http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=0003014B-9D06-1E8F-8EA5809EC5880000">Scientific American article</a> on the phenomenon.) I think I have just a touch of this, or something similar: some letters are likely to trigger certain numbers, and vice versa, usually tied in with phonetics. For example, I have an early drawing I made (I think of myself) that spells my name "KI4K"--R's are tied with 4's. And I once saw a poster for the movie <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119116/">The Fifth Elment</a> that said "IT MU5T BE FOUND", with the S replaced with the similar looking number five. I spent a few seconds wonder why "MUFT" it be found, because for me, 5's are tightly linked to F's, not S's.

I've gained a lot of respect for Slate.com over the past few years...frankly, it's a more consistently interesting site than Salon. Today they had a run down on <a href="http://slate.msn.com/id/2089815/">the top candidates to be the next pope</a>...a lot of politics and other considerations. (Interestingly, the top 4 candidates consist of a Black, a Hispanic, an American, and (in a technical sense) a Jew.)

During His Tour of American Elementary Schools. </i>

I remember the Car Talk guys mentioning today is "National Slack-Off Day". I wonder if that ties into it also being <a href="http://www.simpleliving.net/timeday/default.asp">Take Back Your Time Day</a>? Which seems to be semiserious in some of its goals. (I think in both cases, the choice of date reflects the fact that American workers (on average I assume) work 9 more weeks per year than their European counterparts.<br><br>

'Old Saying' quoted in by Neil Gaiman in American Gods

Samantha Black Crow in Neil Gaiman's "American Gods"

Heh...I was happy to see the rambling discussion on hacker "L33T"-speak yesterday generating almost as any comments as the Israeli/American policy discussion two days before that.

by the American Family Association (right-wing) about gay marriage. The results

Israel is attracted to the old American traditions that abound on the East coast, the museums and the relatives who live close to the city on the Charles River.

<i>American Splendor,</i>

American Gods,

Our lives are geared mainly to deflect the darts thrown at us by the laws of probability. The moment we're able, we insulate ourselves from random acts of hate and destruction. It's always been there - in the neighborhoods we build, the walls between our houses, the wariness with which we treat the unknown. One person in six million will be struck by lightning. Fifteen people in a hundred will experience clinical depression. One woman in sixteen will experience breast cancer. One child in 30,000 will experience a serious limb deformity. One American in five will be victim of a violent crime. A day in which nothing bad happens is a miracle, a day in which all the things that could have gone wrong didn't. The dull day is a triumph of the human spirit, and boredom is a luxury unprecedented in the history of our species. <br>

On my over I was listening to some Christian (oh, err, "Family") Radio, which is kind of how I keep tabs on the American fundamentalist right. And to be fair, some of the shows on it talk more sense than others. But it made me realize that I do have some "old school" ideas about marriage. Two or three years ago I was definately in the "marriage isn't that different from being shacked up" camp, and I guess that's still pretty true on a day-to-day basis. But now I realize that it really taps into this unusually strong sense of commitment I have...I'm a guy with relatively few moral absolutes, but keeping to commitments is one of them. I accept that there are going to be some marriages that are so fundamentally messed up, abusive and what not, that they should be ended, but Mo and I both agree we didn't have that kind of problem...and I believe in the power to self-direct personal growth, and that one of the points of something like a marriage commitment is to provide a shelter for the tough times, to give people a chance to make changes that need to be changed. I really don't put much stock into that whole "well I've just grown apart" shtick. (Or for that matter Mo's "well I just didn't <i>know</i> enough about myself to make that kind of commitment back then" or whatever it is she was saying last night.)<br><br>

Harvey Pekar, the American Splendor anthology.

<b>Tom:</b> I cite Jonathan Chait's New Republic piece from July 2002: Soccer is the sport of "shaggy athletic misfits." Chait reminded us that A) no non-soccer-playing country has ever lost a war to a soccer-playing country, and B) people have been saying soccer is the American sport of the future for going on 25 years. Face it, man: You love a slow, boring, pinko sport.

Slate.com on <a href="http://slate.msn.com/id/2096958/">the rise of the American cupholder</a>. It's synchronicity; I've been borrowing my Aunt and Uncle's minivan (nice that it's a Honda, as is my own hatchback (in the shop); I know where right where all the controls are) and was glancing at the manual (actually looking for instrutions on the fold-up seating) when I found where it described the cupholders: fold-out jobbies that don't seem as sturdy as the ones in my car (the bottom is just a plastic bar that falls down when the thing slides out) but must be less likely to accumulate the dried spilled coffee and other beverage goop that I sometimes have to clean up out of mine. What struck me about the description of the cupholders in the manual was the admonition that they were only to be used when the car wasn't moving, since liquids (maybe even hot liquids!) could slosh around when the vehicle was in motion. Apparently, the manual writers come from some (lawsuit-prone) universe where A. People just like to sit in their stationary car to consume beverages and B. They haven't developed effective drink lid technology.

<a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20040501faessay83301-p0/daniel-w-drezner/the-outsourcing-bogeyman.html">Outsourcing isn't the threat</a> the American worker that many people make it out to be. I know a headhunter who called me to touch base was surprised to hear my company is going back to an inhouse strategy after doing some singificant offshoring.

Davy Crockett, via a sidebar on this Slate.com piece on <a href="http://slate.msn.com/id/2098065/">classic American archetypes</a>.

Someone posted this on the loveblender and even though later, when I realized that motivational stuff is what this guy does and so I felt...I dunno, vaguely shnookered, being the kind of guy who doesn't put much stock in "feel good phrases", somehow this passage really moved me, thinking in terms of my upcoming divorce. Maybe it helped that it was in the middle of a sea of love poems. It also kind of invoked the last voiceover in American Beauty.

"American Beauty". Yesterday I referenced this passage, and realized it had never made it into any of my journals.

This <a href="http://www.dawnofthedeadmovie.net/experience/blackout.htm">tie-in with the new Dawn of The Dead</a> game is good old school zombie-blastin' shotgun fun. (I just watched the 80s version the other night at Jim's movie night. The biggest obvious difference was the old school zombies just kind lumber around, and the new one lacks the sly(ish) commentary on American consumerism.)

A <a href="http://www.johnshirley.net/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabid=336&calDate=4|25|2004#204">John Shirley blog entry</a> on a recent Scientific American article about how we're being drowned in options. It also touches upon how there are two basic chooser types: Maximizers, who tend to become obsessed about looking for the "best" option, and Satisficers, who have less stress in general by following a "good enough is best" philosophy, but even that path is becoming more problematic.<br><br>

<table><tr><td><IMG SRC="/journal.aux/2004.04.30.johnbull.jpg" width="150" height="150" ></td><td valign="bottom"><a href="http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/british/britintr.html">John Bull and Uncle Sam</a>...I hadn't heard much about the former gentleman, who is parallel in concept to Sam, though not as prevalent these days. From a <a href="http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/british/">Library of Congress</a> exhibit on British-American relations. Do any other countries have semi-official personifications like these?</td></tr></table>

Mr. Secretary, the behavior by Americans at the prison in Iraq is, as we all acknowledge, immoral, intolerable and un-American. It deserves the apology that you have given today and that have been given by others in high positions in our government and our military.

I cannot help but say, however, that those who were responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11th, 2001, never apologized. Those who have killed hundreds of Americans in uniform in Iraq working to liberate Iraq and protect our security have never apologized.

And those who murdered and burned and humiliated four Americans in Fallujah a while ago never received an apology from anybody.

The <a href="http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/Opinion/Editorials/03OpOPN62051504.htm">poems being censored for being "un-American"</a> is one of the most jaw-dropping stories I've read this week. As <a href="http://www.thoughtviper.com/newest.html#new">Bill the Splut</a> put it, "What's the Eternal War on Terror about again? Oh, right, <i>they hate freedom.</i>"<br><br>

With all the talk about the <a href="http://www.ceremonialbugle.com/">digital bugle</a> (an insert to a real bugle that plays Taps, supposedly sounds pretty good because it uses the horn's bell to resonate, to make up for the way American WW2 Veterans are passing away in great numbers, and there aren't that many qualified buglers) I found this site, <a href="http://www.tapsbugler.com/">taps bugler</a>. It's really a moving song, so melancholy. It's a real challenge to get right...between the high emotion and the way the player doesn't usually get a chance to warm up at all, it's very easy to crack notes, like happened at <a href="http://www.tapsbugler.com/BrokenNote.html">JFK's internment</a> at Arlington cemetary.

But if there are some Americans who want peace badly enough to give up their right to wage war, they are being outvoiced by our militant Old Guard, whose idea of a foreign policy is to keep the United States armed to the teeth and ever ready to challenge any country which disputes our world leadership. Regardless of the existence of personal misgivings, we, as a nation, are placing our reliance not on international cooperation but upon the atomic bomb and the willingness of "our boys" to back our decisions with their lives. If it takes two to make a war, we are making certain that we are one of them.

That last link goes to a long-past episode of "<a href="http://www.thislife.org/">This American Life</a>," the WBEZ (Chicago)-based public radio show that gives a weekly hour of radio documentaries around a single theme.

<a href="http://www.atariage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=52334&highlight=">This AtariAge discussion thread</a> on 2600 "3D Tic-Tac-Toe" reminded me of seeing Hillis' famous <a href="http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/naha/TT-tic-tac-toe/readme.html">Tinker Toy Tic-Tac-Toe Computer</a> at the Boston Computer Museum. This <a href="http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~cfs/472_html/Intro/TinkertoyComputer/TinkerToy.html">Scientific American article</a> explains how it works. (Man, "Computer Recreations" was such a great column, back when computers were fun toys people could program rather than word processing and web browsing appliances. Interestingly, the columns author, AK Dewdney, now seems to be a <a href="http://feralnews.com/issues/911/dewdney/ghost_riders_1-4_1.html">9/11 skeptic</a>, in terms of odd holes in the story...)

be a truck feels wasteful as well.) I've thought about some other vehicles: Consumer Reports loves the Ford Focus, but I guess I don't get good vibes from American cars. I even toyed with a Jeep Wrangler, but, besides feeling a little like a poser for having such an outdoorsy thing, it's not recommended as a great highway vehicle.

Their folkways, foods, and fads are unfathomable to odinary Americans.

Selfridge [the department store magnate] was an interesting fellow who provides a salutary moral lesson for us all. An American, he devoted his productive years to building Selfridges into Europe's finest shopping emporium, in the process turing Oxford Street into London's main shopping venue. He led a life of stern rectitude, early bedtime and tireless work. He drank lots of milk and never fooled around. But in 1918 his wife died and the sudden release from marital bounds rather went to his head. He took up with a pair of Hungarian-American cuties known in music-hall circles as the Dolly Sisters, and fell into rakish ways. With a Dolly on each arm, he took to roaming the casinos of Europe, gambling and losing lavlishly. He dined out every night, invested foolish sums in racehorses and motorcars, bought Highcliffe Castle and laid plans to build a 250-room estate at Hengistbury Head near by. In ten years he raced through $8 million, lost control of Selfridges, lost his castle and London home, his racehorses and his Rolls-Royces, and eventually ended up living alone in a small flat in Putney and travelling by bus. He died penniless and virtually forgotten on 8 May 1947. But of course he had had the inestimable pleasure of bonking twin sisters, which is the main thing.

The book is an American ex-pat about to return to the USA and making one last 7-week tour of the British isles on his own - a good read I'd recommend, laugh-out-loud in many parts. Soon after relating that story he talks about the British love of small pleasures, and how its made his own life richer, and how he knew when he was becoming one of them: <blockquote class="quote">

Two Irish flag decals plus an American flag with "No Vacancy" over it. Now, I'm more or less ok with a strong devotion to ethnic heritage even though I'm just a WASP-mutt, but do you think this person has a deep understanding of the history of Irish-American immigration, and the way the rest of the country responded to it at the time?<br><br>

<a href="http://www.womenswallstreet.com/WWS/article_landing.aspx?titleid=1&articleid=711">Middle Eastern men behaving oddly</a> on an airplane was <a href="http://metafilter.com/mefi/34361">poo-poo'd by the Metafilter folk</a> who pointed to a Ann Coulter swing, but I admit I'd be freaked out a bit if I saw the events as described. That's the thing...the American populous is told to keep our eyes open for suspcious stuff, but we have NO idea what's really suspicous.

I was reading about Lance Armstrong taking the leader's yellow jersey back in the Tour de France, and they mentioned he as a strong supporting team, including fellow American Floyd Landis. For some reason, I always have more affection for supporting cast than for the stars, just the workmanlike way they go about kicking butt and living through triumphs and defeats everyone else hardly ever hears about, so I found Landis' <a href="http://www.cyclingnews.com/riders/2004/diaries/floyd/?id=default">journal at CyclingNews.com</a> to make for some interesting reading.

Scientific American on how <a href="http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=00094511-E068-10FA-89FB83414B7F0000">The Law of Large Numbers</a> guarantees that "miracles" happen 295 times a day in America. Or as

"There are 27O million Americans. The US is filthy

This experience was only part of a larger process of edification. Living in Europe, I gradually came to appreciate American virtues I'd always taken for granted, or even disdained--among them a lack of self-seriousness, a grasp of irony and self-deprecating humor, a friendly informality with strangers, an unashamed curiosity, an openness to new experience, an innate optimism, a willingness to think for oneself and speak one's mind and question the accepted way of doing things. (One reason why Euro- peans view Americans as ignorant is that when we don't know something, we're more likely to admit it freely and ask questions.)

If under Saddam it was a 'potential' threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to 'imminent and active threat,' a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.

Though historians seldom allude to it, the American Dream is largely a European creation transported to American soil and frozen in time. [...] The American Dream emphasizes economic growth, personal wealth, and independence. The new European Dream focuses more on sustainable development, quality of life, and interdependence. The American Dream pays homage to the work ethic. The European Dream is more attuned to leisure and "deep play." The American Dream is inseparable from the country's religious heritage and deep spiritual faith. The European Dream is secular to the core. The American Dream depends on assimilation: We associate success with shedding our former ethnic ties and becoming free agents in the great American melting pot. The European Dream, by contrast, is based on preserving one's cultural identity and living in a multicultural world. The American Dream is wedded to love of country and patriotism. The European Dream is more cosmopolitan and less territorial.

The author doesn't claim that Europe is perfect, but its constitution and outlook, less unbridledly optimistic than the American and with a strong sense of interdependence, might be more attuned to the modern world where barriers to long distance communication and trade have dropped in so many ways. Also the author seems to be asserting a new bipolar USA vs. Europe outlook without consider how, say, China is doing, not to mention the rest of the world.

Dang, sorry to see my American/European dream thing didn't get any response...

<table><tr><td><IMG SRC="/journal.aux/2004.10.17.caramelapples.jpg" width="262" height="262" ></td><td valign="bottom">--One cool part about dating someone from another country is stumbling on some tiny bit of Americana that you didn't realize is unique, but is also quite wonderful...yesterday it was Caramel Apples for Ksenia, not really known in Russia.</td></tr></table>

I'll tell you, before we get out of Iraq, it's going to make Viet Nam look like a good idea. [...] I can't think of a single case where a popular local guerrilla movement failed to defeat a conventional foreign occupying force. From the American Revolution through Viet Nam, the guerrillas always win. Usually, it takes them a long time and they suffer most of the casualties, but they win.

I've heard American kids rank low in actual math skills but high in math skills confidence, and that's the kind of thing that seems messed up. Kids...in fact, any healthy individual...needs some amount of self-confidence, but can it be taken too far?

However, there are certain things that are so wonderful in American life that I can hardly stand it myself. Chief among these, without any doubt, is the garbage disposal. A garbage disposal is everything a labor-saving device should be and so seldom is -- noisy, fun, extremely hazardous, and so dazzingly good at what it does that you cannot imagine how you ever managed without one. If you had asked me eighteen months ago what the prospects were that shortly my chief amusement would be placing assorted objects down a hole in the kitchen sink, I believe I would have laughed in your face, but in fact it is so.

I find this kind of stuff fascinating. I noticed some of the guys from India at work are a bit more touchy feely than American guys tend to be. One of them, actually a half-Indian, half-Kuwaiti guy named Noor thought it was actually because there was more segregation of the genders when they're growing up, so (at least for heterosexuals) physical contact doesn't have as much of a possible sexual charge. Interesting theory...I do think American males are way too uptight about someone thinking they might be gay.

"[stuff]", huh? It's an intriguing idea, though I wonder if "American" would ever be considered a tribe there, or if there's too much animosity for that...

The Americans sure knew how to name toys. We, to be honest, didn't. So, while this boxing automaton chestnut went under one of the best names for any game, or indeed any thing, ever, in the States, the rather rarer British version was renamed... Raving Bonkers Fighting Robots.

So I'm finally almost done with this book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0609807072/">Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs At The Turn of the Millennium</a>. Put out by the now sadly defunct site Word.com, it's a terrific read; all these people in different careers talking about what they do, and how. (And I have been working on this book for a long while; I think it was my "occasional" reading all the way back at my dotcom Event Zero...) Today I read the essay "Nurse", and it shattered some illusions I had about the work. Ever since my dad got his RN degree thinking he might have a job change I've had this thought "gee, if all else fails, maybe I can go to school and do that". But according to this essay, the "nursing shortage" is a bit of a myth...heh, it osunds like it's not a lack of qualified workers but a lack of HMOs and other groups wanting to shell out for enough staff. And I knew it was grueling work, but man, it sounds like in this day and age of managed costs it has gotten really, really bad. Sigh. Always a little disconcerting when your Plan...well, not Plan B, more like G or H, falls though, even if you hope you'd never need it.

<i>American Splendor,</i>

<i>UPDATE: related <a href="http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=000CB565-F330-11BE-AD0683414B7F0000&ref=rdf">Scientific American article</a> via <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/pentomino/">R Pentomino</a></i>

The American Dialect Society's <a href="http://www.americandialect.org/woty.html">1990 Word of the Year</a>

[[`A Few Hints About Everyday American Life`]]

<li>Americans never use patronymics. Many Americans are given middle

<li>Americans usually make appointments with other people, even with

<li>In virtually all American cities, public buses are entered from the

American schools do not prohibit the use of the left hand for writing.

<li>You are likely to find that most Americans are eager to try to

I liked the thing about the smiles. The "Americans usually make

(Pekar of "American Splendor" fame.) Google doesn't seem to think that it's an exact quote, but its a neat idea.

<a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2005/03/23/report_kyrgyzstan_go.html">boingboing post about the trouble in Kyrgyzstan</a> I had to double check to make sure it wasn't one of those made up countries made to trip people up, like when Spy Magazine asked American Politicians "What

<li>Slate reports that <a href="http://slate.msn.com/id/2117224/">Americans are starting to pay off credit card debt</a>! Good.

Dennis Flanagan, editor of <i>Scientific American.</i>

So seeing Scientific American's "50, 100, 150 Years Ago" feature gave me an idea...having journaled regularly for the past 8 years and daily for over half of that, it makes sense for me to make a new feature:<br><br>

Read that book for my UU "Science and Spirituality" group...good stuff, possibly there would have been even better quotes from its lovely in depth analysis of nature combined with philisophial speculation, maybe I wasn't paying enough attention because I needed to read it for the Tuesday meeting after buying the book on Monday. This bit reminds me a little bit of the ending of "American Beauty".

<a href="http://seanbaby.com/stupid/comicads05.shtml">a new Best of the Worst of Comic Advertising</a>...Wheaties as Booby Trap for American Solidiers. I went and read all the old ones listed there on the side...that is deeply, deeply funny stuff. It reminds how rare it is to literally laugh out loud at online material, and to do so so many times in one place is really pretty amazing.

What makes this book amazing is its attention to the tactile and design details of all these objects around us...it's astounding, kind of like "The Design of Everyday Things" meets "Rain Man" with <i>just</i> a dash of "American Psycho" and maybe "Still-life With Woodpecker's" respect of inanimate objects thrown in for good measures...from the mechanism of the escalator itself, to changes in milk carton design, from the evolution of paper towel dispenser in public restrooms to the little red pullstrings for bandaids that never worked. The book leaves you with a profound sense of recognition, a constant stream of "oh yeah..." when you realize how much thought has gone into the mass produced material objects that we are surrounded with.

Slate on the history of reactions to <a href="http://slate.msn.com/id/2120494/">American Gothic</a>...go get yerself some culture! While we're at it, check out this

[[`Excerpts from "An American Childhood"`]]

<li>In other anecdotal news...a lot of American popsongs make it other countries untranslated. A friend of mine from Germany had a teacher who swore that "Under the Boardwalk" was about/"sung by" bugs that lived under the wooden floorboards of someone's house. Anyway, there was a bus with a billboard for Dennis Leary in "Rescue Me"...somehow because of the song Ksenia had the idea that "Rescue" was something like the F-word. (And the billboard, with Leary falling from a building as seen from the window he jumped from, didn't help matters.) Ah well, live and learn.

<a href="http://wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,68626,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_7">Asians and North Americans literally see the world differently</a>...when shown a scene, North Americans tend to focus on the thing in the foreground, while the Asians give more attention to the background and the scene as a whole. That's really interesting...I wonder what all the implications of that are.

I'm not the first person to make this kind of joke, but after <a href="http://slate.msn.com/id/2124601/">reading about Peta's campaign</a> drawing strong parallels between human slavery and our treatment of animals, and then hearing about the NCAA's <a href="http://www.dailyillini.com/media/paper736/news/2005/08/24/News/Ncaa-Policy.Change.Unclear-969148.shtml">recent decisions about "Native American" mascots</a>, and then seeing a bumpersticker for some local school's "Lions" team, I got to thinking if the next step for Peta is to discourage the use of that kind of mascot.

<a href="http://www.dailylush.com/archives/thunderbird_the_american_classic.html">Thunderbird: The American Classic</a>. A history of it and under "Wino" wines. Sadly, no mention of my personal ghetto favorite, Mad Dog 20/20. Still, "handing [Thunderbird] out to Native Americans who were just being released from jail" is rather evil.

It was the first Jewish funeral I've been to, I believe. It was largely conducted in Russian, with some traditional Hebrew here and a bit of explanatory English there. One tradition I admired relative to current Protestant American habits is having mourners put the dirt on the coffin, either in symbolic garden-spadefuls, or even more utilitarian shovelfuls. I think there's a sense of closure with that, and a macabre beauty in restoring some of the literal meaning of the phrase "burying a loved one". (If I remember rightly the Protestant funerals I've been too often have the mourners bear witness to lowering the casket into the ground, but then leave an open grave, having the groundskeepers do everything after.)

Her biography and life as a performer is given an illustrated writeup in Harvey "American Splendour" Pekar's "Our Movie Year", along with many other obscure jazz and blues artists.

(Though that may have been <a href="http://www.snopes.com/history/american/bushscan.htm">greatly exagerated</a>.)

pretenses by lying to the American people and to the Congress; he has

I was watching that show "Wife Swap". Whew. They really find the extremes of American families, and then throw 'em together...the huntin' hillbillies with the Confederate flags paired with the PETA, vegan, raw-food, maybe-we-can-even-just-live-on-sunlight hippy... pretty compelling. Of course, they don't show anything about the "traditional" meaning of wife-swapping, which would be whole new levels of weirdness.

Luckily, renaissances celebrate immaturity and idealism. The growing field of "neotany" looks at the extended childhoods of species as a sign of their development. The longer an infant is helpless, the more advanced the species to which it belongs. Fish are fully developed from birth, dogs depend on their mothers for a few months, and human beings are helpless for several years. Likewise, the extended time for youth and exploration our society now offers (a full 90 percent of American residents now graduate high school, and more than a third make it through college) means more time for practice, development, and play. Growing up should not mean an end to this freedom to expand and innovate. It can be its rebirth in an entirely new context: that of playful work.

Boingboing <a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2005/12/11/americans_smile_brit.html">linked to a NY Times piece about the difference in Americans and Brits' smiles</a>...later followed up with a different spin on the same research by a UK paper. The Americans say that the Brits' smiles are more forced and aware of the social hierarchy, the Brits say the Americans' are more shallow and easier to fake.

An American Childhood,

JLA: American Dreams,

Best of American Splendor,

American Splendour: Our Movie Year,

I also liked "You don't go to war with regular laws, which are made outta red tape and bureaucracy and Neville Chamberlain. You go to war with great big strapping War Laws made outta tanks and cold hard steel and the American Fightin Man and WAR, KABOOOOOOM!"<br><br>

<a href="http://www.americantelevisionpreservation.com/TV_Vault/Wide_World_of_Sports_Open_77.mov">the relevant show introduction</a>. Wheeee!

<a href="http://mikefinch.com/oi/sp.htm">Mike Finch's British and American Spelling page</a>. A well-balanced appraisal of the differences, and descriptions of which spelling he goes with for various splits as he considers himself writing "Mid-Atlantic" English.

I like his praise of the American "gotten" and some of the nuance it provides. (Actually the other day I wrote "tooken", which is slip I make sometimes...)

One of the side effects of Netflix is that the barrier to entry for "guilty pleasure" movies is that much lower. Case-in-point, "American Pie Presents: Band Camp". It definitely harkened back to the old "teenage sex comedy" tradition, plus there were enough semi-realistic marching band references to keep me entertained.

<a href="http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyid=2006-06-26T124750Z_01_N19345572_RTRUKOC_0_US-LIFE-FRIENDS.xml&src=rss">Americans' circle of close friends shrinking</a>. Man, that stinks. As more of my friends get flung off to far reaches of the country, I've been thinking about working harder on the relationships that are in the area. That actually would have been one of the bad parts of that Senior Residence deal, being stuck further from EB and FoSO... (incidentally, I'm amused, and vaguely concerned, at how the 3 of us have been kind of dominating the sidebar.) In fact, I'm trying to persuade another close friend to consider becoming my flatmate, which would be cool. More on that later as, and if, it develops.

And nice use of your veto on the Stem Cells. With 72% of Americans in favor of it, I hope it greatly helps to make a huge wedge between your party's unholy alliance of Fundamentalists and traditional Conservatives.

I took a number of African-American culture classes at Tufts (to do double duty for "Foreign Culture" and "English major" credits, and also because it was some great stuff) so I've been pondering on that quote within that context. It's a great line from Holiday, with a blend of coolness and sincerity that acknowledges a bit of the complexity in race relations and entertainment in this country.

<blockquote class="quote">Despite the splashy success of companies such as Google and Yahoo!, businesses at the core of the information economy -- software, semiconductors, telecom, and the whole gamut of Web companies -- have lost more than 1.1 million jobs in the past five years. Those businesses employ fewer Americans today than they did in 1998, when the Internet frenzy kicked into high gear.</blockquote>

a (previously) "lost novel" of Jules Verne called "Paris in the Twentieth Century". The cynic in me wants to say, pity it didn't stay lost... some of the technology predictions were interesting, but mostly it was a chance for Verne to sound a panic about the the threats of technology and "modern" outlooks (once or twice those are painted as the "American" ways) for classical culture and literature.

<blockquote class="quote">Kahneman, Krueger and their collaborators also offer a vital insight -- that happiness comes from choosing time over money, but most Americans choose money over time. "Leisure is better for happiness than increased income," they argue, supposing that time spent in travel, having new experiences, relaxing, hiking, reading, or simply looking up at the stars is more important to our sense of well-being than a new car or impressive house. Unless you are in a bad financial situation, Kahneman and Krueger recommend you spend less time working, accept somewhat lower income, and use your freed hours to experience life.</blockquote>

It's still a decent snack, a bag is like 150 calories, 20 of fat, and satisfies a sweet tooth so long as it isn't craving chocolate. But the "prizes"... ugh. I bought a carton at Cosctco, so not only are the prizes irretrievably lame (Hey kids, push a pencil through this decorative piece of paper to make a pencil topper! Here's a picture of an American historical figure as a boy, fold it around to see them as a grownup! Bend and tear this to make a very sad little puppet mouth!) but they're also repetitive, the same 5 or 6 things again and again.

<a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/americas/10/17/numbers.population/">300 Million Americans</a> today!

Jimminy Crickets, it's not bad enough Kerry lost the 2004 election, now he's trying to <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/10/31/kerry.mccain/index.html">poison the democrat's mid-term chances</a>, attracting attention in the most negative way possible, and away from the already fading interest in Republican scandals. The implication that American troops are undereducated ignoramus, that military life is the option once you haven't applied yourself in other fields, is the least politically correct thing I've heard any politician utter in recent memory. <i>In the comments TSM points out the missing "us", but it was a dumb joke to begin with, and terribly delivered. More in the comments.</i>

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_faux_pas">International Faux Pas</a>, a topic that I've always found interesting, though the list wasn't quite as juicy as I had hoped. A bit later then BoingBoing linked to <a href="http://www.cjr.org/iraq/chapt4.htm">stories of American Soldiers making similar kind of cultural mistakes</a>, even when they mean well. That last link is part of a <a href="http://www.cjr.org/iraq/index.html">Oral History of Reporting Iraq</a> by the Columbia Journalism Review... they're still doling out the various chapters but it's some good stuff.

<a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2154579/?nav=tap3">Happy Late Birthday Iran-Contra!</a> I remember my dad saying at the time that was the kind of thing that brought down presidencies. Guess not! And I remember after that, having NO idea what to make of Ollie North... being in like, seventh grade, I was a little more prone to that weird "puppy dog eyed American hero" propaganda they were spinning for him.

American Beauty

American Pie: Band Camp,

American article</a> on a scientific look at procrastination... there's even a <a href="http://www.procrastinus.com/">website by the guy</a>.

An estimated 80 percent of Americans are infected with the virus that causes cold sores and 20 percent of American adults experience recurring cold sores two to 12 times per year.

There are over four million people in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Boston">Greater Boston Area</a> (admittedly a big space geographically) and that leads me to suspect that I have no idea how a society that size can actually function, how an economy sustains itself, how relationships are formed, what public opinion really means. And there must also be a conflict with people's need to stand out from the crowd, to really live that American sense of "rugged individualism". Hell, I'm surprised there aren't more people doing Really Stupid Things to try and get on Fox News.

The authors also find that over the last century, Americans, both men and women, have gotten steadily—and hugely—less happy. The difference in happiness of men between men of my generation, born in the 1960s, and my father's generation, born in the 1920s, is the same as the effect of a tenfold difference in income. In other words, if my father had little money compared to his contemporaries and I have lots of money compared to mine, I can still expect to be less happy. Here, curiously, the European pattern diverges. Happiness falls for the birth years from 1900 to about 1950, and generations born on the continent since World War II have gotten successively happier.

The quote now reminds me of a "This American Life" piece yesterday that came to the conclusion that, for the most part, people tip what they always tip, regardless of the friendliness of the server. But if you can make life feel a little better for everyone involved, even if it's just the American faux-friendliness, why not?

So at work they rejiggered things so now the 3 new guys (myself included) are in the single "war room". Thanks to a coin flip (hint: always guess tails with American coins) I got the desk that doesn't have its back to the world.

RIP Kurt Vonnegut. <a href="http://www.americanhumanist.org/press/ChicagoSunTimes.SnakeOil.php">Kurt is up in Heaven now.</a>

But whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living. And someone needs to take the fall for this. So instead of blaming no one for this (which is kind of cowardly) or blaming everyone (which is meaningless), I'm going to blame John Cusack.

Ah, the joy of Liberal Guilt: I've started taking my daily coffee without milk, just to see if I feel better with less dairy. But if the Dunkin Donuts worker is African-American, I have to admit I catch myself before asking for it "black".

Slate has had some interesting stuff lately. I enjoyed the gusto Blogging the Bible displayed for <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2164361/entry/2164362?nav=tap3">the book of Solomon</a>, and today's meditation on <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2164517?nav=tap3">the SkyMall's SnacDaddy product</a> as a message about American culture is not to be missed.

But he's willing to call a spade a spade and skewer sacred cows like the greatness of the American Military (historically, it's really supply and logistics that we do really well, and beyond that we probably have only our fair share of heroes.) Like his <a href="http://www.exile.ru/2006-December-15/war_nerd.html">take on WWII</a>... pretty much all of Europe was borderline fascist, and the real fight was the Nazis vs Soviet Russia, the rest was largely window dressing.

2 shelves - american humor (including 1 just of James Thurber, Garrison Keillor, and a hint of Woody Allen) which drifts into...

It makes me want to posit some crazy alternate history where Ben Franklin stayed and became a swim instructor, and somehow that caused monumental changes in the landscape of international relations with the Revolutionary War being replaced by some kind of swim-off. Ben Franklin-led squads of English Aristocratic swimmers vs a George Washington-coached ragtag squad of Americans... the minutemen, who could swim 5 boat-lengths in that time, or some such, with the fate of colonial independence at stake. (More on

Very readable <a href="http://english2american.com/index.html#index">English2American</a> glossary. I'm always fascinated by differences in vocabulary and attitude.

Until the nineteenth century, oddly enough, Americans almost never commented on the weather when describing public events.

One Night Stands with American History

Nuance does not seem to be a predominant theme in current American policy.

David Foster Wallace has a tremendous command of footnotes. He's also a hell of a writer, and his essay "Authority and American Usage" is causing me to rebalance my view on the whole Prescriptivism vs. Descriptivism debate. (My current thinking is that above all I want to be a Utilitarian, that the best use of language is what takes the least amount of mental energy to construct and the audience to parse. This might be hopelessly subjective.)

The Model T - whose mass production technique was the work of engineer William C. Klann, who had visited a slaughterhouse's "disassembly line" - conferred to Americans the notion of automobility as something akin to natural law, a right endowed by our Creator. A century later, the consequences of putting every living soul on gas-powered wheels are piling up, from the air over our cities to the sand under our soldiers' boots.

<a href="http://www.theonion.com/content/news/14_american_apparel_models_freed?utm_source=slate_rss_1">14 American Apparel Models Freed In Daring Midnight Raid</a> seemed really funny. I guess because those "American Apparel" ads, keeping that whole Calvin Klein grunge sex vibe (but losing most of the underage factor) kind of sneak up on you, and "American Apparel" is a brilliantly bland name.

A video of a <a href="http://www.slatev.com/player.html?id=1184473562">British Gal trying to learn to sound like an American</a> was less captivating than I'd hoped, but the opening montage of UK actors speaking "naturally" and then "American" was great. Accents are so funny, the way certain vowel habits get burnt into our brain, and the difficulty of hearing one's own accent as an accent and not just "normal".

I caught the last few innings of the Sox grabbing the American League championship away from the Indians last night. There were a few instances where the Tribe looked comically bad at defense... to quote the Chicago Tribune:

The Rockies have been living an October fairy tale. Sure, it's too bad they won't be getting their happily ever after. Sure, it's a bit disorienting for this Sox fan to feel like the wicket stepmother. But if some bigger, richer, American League team has to crush their sweet, expansion-team dreams, at least it's our team doing the crushing.

Man, this Scientific American article on <a href="http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-smart-kids">The Secret to Raising Smart Kids</a> rang more than a few bells for me...

The Average American Male: A Novel,

One-Night Stands with American History,

Kerouac's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dharma-Bums-Penguin-Classics-Deluxe/dp/0143039601">The Dharma Bums</a> had some real insights in to the challenges of an American applying Zen Bhuddism to real life.

The New American Splendor Anthology,

How does pop culture play in this... is the Huckabee campaign helped by the movie "i <3 huckabees"? Is Obama aided by "24" and its portrayal of an African American president?

The great divide in thinking about American foreign policy these past few years is not so much between Realists and Neoconservatives; it's between realists (with a small r) and fantasists. The split lies not in what is desirable over the long run but in what is possible here and now. It is a debate about not so much what America should do as what it can do--bout the limits of American power in the post-Cold War world, about whether there are limits, about the way the world works.

"Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power"

And consider how modest the administration's standard of success has become. Can there be any doubt that they would go for a reduction to 100,000 troops—and claim victory—if they had any confidence at all that the gains they brag about would hold at that level of support? The proper comparison isn't to the situation a year ago. It's to the situation before we got there. Imagine that you had been told in 2003 that when George W. Bush finished his second term, dozens of American soldiers and hundreds of Iraqis would be dying violently every month; that a major American goal would be getting the Iraqi government to temper its "de-Baathification" campaign so that Saddam Hussein's former henchmen could start running things again (because they know how); and "only" 100,000 American troops would be needed to sustain this equilibrium. You might have several words to describe this situation, but success would not be one of them.

<i>Now Reading: "Thank You and OK! An American Zen Failure in Japan"</i><br><br>

But spending seems to be what our economy is based on! Is it some giant shell game? I remember listening to public radio when I was sick, some commentator who kind of contradicted herself without blinking an eye, on the one hand saying this downturn was going to be rough because consumers can't spend their way out of it, on the other hand chastising Americans for spending this way to begin with.

Josh describes the vibe of Chiba as being roughly "Coolidge Corner"-ish. I could see that, with the caveat that stores and buildings tend to be brighter and more garish than their American counterparts. Here's Chiba on a rainy Friday night:

PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN - WHERE AT LEAST I KNOW I HAVE A MINIMUM OF 36 KINDS OF MUFFIN

<br>What does it say about Americans that I want to call any any big construction vehicle that's not a crane or a dumptruck a bulldozer? Anyway, these cute purple vehicles were all over Japan.

<a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2004/09/02/2005-suzuki-swift-another-cool-small-car-that-americans-wont/">autoblog</a>.

<br>We stopped at a place called MOS Burger. (Josh says it stands for Mountain Ocean Sea, and back in the day it used to be blatantly a McDondalds clone. But it was pretty distinct, and tasty. Served notably hot. But again, I'm weirdly amused by the way the table thingy had a picture of a cow. Americans are so shy of thinking about the animals that they eat!

<br>Really dull American-tourist style shot at Hakone-Machi. We got some corn on the cob on a stick there, grilled, basted in soy sauce, wonderful. I wish I had taken a picture of the vendor pounding in the sticks with a mallet, it (sigh) would've made quite a nice shot.

<br>An American-steamer themed ship "Frontier". Note the deer head at the top. Nice! Also, swan and panda boats on the other side of the dock.

<br>Compared to "Swimming Pool", American James Turrel's "Blue Planet Sky" was rather static...

<br>Here's Big Papi. The Sox struggle a bit at first, and I could kind of sense how the Japanese announcer was rooting for them... especially Dice K, it might well be a point of national pride there, seeing how one of their former stars is doing in American baseball...

"This book," he says, further, "is a study of American literature from an economic point of view. It takes our living writers, and turns their pockets inside out, asking 'Where did you get it?' and 'What did you do for it?'"

Josh is a high school teacher, and he mentions the challenges of coping with the Japanese "group mentality"; many of the cliches about being taught that "the highest nail gets hammered down" and the stress on group consensus have their basis in reality. He will ask a question of one student, and the student will consult with the small peer group to come up with the group's answer. ("What about intragroup disagreement? How is that resolved?" "Oldest male wins".) Similarly, a student asked a question but forced to separate from the group will often hem and haw and say they don't know, even if they do. (Two possibly cosmetic similarities between Japanese and Russians: maybe it's not the same but the latter also have no compunction about collaborating on individual assignments (to an extent that an American might call cheating) and people of both nations seem to love slippers around the house.)

These were things I saw reproductions of at the Hiroshima Peace Museum. Both were English documents with sections highlighted in red, and only those sections were translated into Japanese. I tried to get a feel for how "out of context" the excerpts were. Anyway, Einstein's famous letter warned about the possibility of atomic weapons and urged FDR to start research programs (though he, logically enough, wasn't sure if they would be portable enough to be dropped by a plane, or if they would have to be, say, snuck in by ship) and the other document was the mundane bureaucratic process of funding the programs and selecting the possible target sites. (I'm not sure what Hiroshima made of the USA's failure to attack it prior to the atomic bomb, despite the place having some military significance. (The Americans wanted a better evaluation of just what their weapon could do.) The people of Hiroshima certain knew they were on the list of eligible cities for bombing -- it must have been incredibly disheartening for the citizens to have been razing some of their own buildings in order to make firebreaks, but I guess that would have only helped for more conventional bombs.)

So the tourguides use of "please", as in "please look to your left" (to regard an interesting building), struck me as odd. Not incorrect, completely fine grammar, but I never noticed that an American in the same role won't say please in quite that way, when it was for that person's own benefit. I guess we'd say "Now if you would", and maybe even throw in a please after that, but now that phrasing strikes me as a little contrived and complex. Josh pointed that Japanese, being above all a polite language, has a few different forms of request that all translate to "please" more or less, hence the confusion.

Erin also seems to have inherited Josh's eyes, since she has the "double eyelid" that I guess is a characteristic detail of European guys that I had never heard of. But apparently Asian women are <i>very</i> aware of that, many even consider surgery to get it added! So strange! Obviously I was aware of general eye-shape difference, but not this aspect. (I wonder what things an American might be cosmetically aware of that a Japanese person might not notice, or vice versa...)

So there's essentially no tipping in Japan. If you really had to do something for some helpful person, you could get a small gift, but a small cash hand over would probably be insulting... people are just expected to do their job. I can't imagine how hard it is to make the reverse trip and learn how Americans tip. I mean, restaurants it's pretty straight forward, but there are some other situations where even Americans aren't clear what's expected.

The shift from the serious to the common (a shadow of the shift from Hebrew to Yiddish) is a frequent linguistic device of American Jewish comics. Consider Woody Allen's line: "Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends."

But [in Tokyo] we are confronted with a world synthesis. Here there meet and mingle the twenty-six civilizations of Toynbee, the eighteen religions of Turchi, the five <i>kalpas</i> (Buddhist comic eras), von Eickstedt's thirty-eight races and sub-races of mankind, the fifty-six ways of making love of the Kama-sutra, the seventy styles of cooking, the six perfumes, the eighty-two smells, the 120,000 stinks, the twelve dozen kinds of dirt, the seven wonders, the thousand lights, the 2,600 tongues, the thirty-four vices (with the exception of opium smoking), all the fantasies, and the two great principles of <i>yin</i> and <i>yang</i> which according to Chinese magical ideas, generate the infinite variety of the world. Not for nothing has another American called it a 'wonderful, hybrid, dissolute, noisy, quiet, brooding, garish, simpering, silly, contemplative, cultured, absurd city'.

The book, a thoughtful find at the local swap shop from EvilB and Leslee, is a view of Japan from the very end of the 1950s, and its intriguing to compare its experience of Japan to my own, especially since the American lens has changed greatly in that half-century.

So I finished Moraini's "Meeting with Japan" -- turns out I misspoke earlier, he was an Italian, not an American, visiting Japan 15 years after being held as a prisoner there along with his family during WW2. Very good read, though, a very thoughtful gift from EB.

Nearby, some Americans were saying good-by in voices mimicking the cadence of water running into a large old bathtub

Zen Buddhism has an appeal (and more on how I've found the Western philosophy that seems very much in accord with it's lack of sense of self), but I've never even engaged in a Zazen practice. I got introduced to it through "Zen Flesh, Zen Bones", and then learned a bit more through some "Zen for Dummies" book, which despite the title (which, if you squint, really is just an overly self-deprecating way of saying 'for the beginner's mind",maybe) seems to be a pretty fair introduction to the Westernized form of the practice. Also "Thank You And OK!" which is a great account of an American trying to find a place in a more ritualized and traditional community, and "The Dharma Bums" (I think recognizing the name of the forum drew me here in my Google searching.)

The American Language in 3000 AD</a>. Pretty cool stuff! (Though usually, the variation of English everyone in the Sci Fi galaxy speaks is called "Basic", not "Anglic" or "Galach")

On the other hand, it's easy to forget than "female breasts must be covered" isn't a Universal Law. (And not that uncovered breasts at, say, a European beach aren't de-sexed, any more than a supple torso or curve of hip on an American beach is... it's just the old American Puritan reaching out and trying to cram sensuality into as small a carton as possible.)

WHEREAS, Rock music has become an integral part of American culture, having attained a degree of acceptance no one would have thought possible twenty years ago; and

Watched the VP debate last night. Palin wasn't terrible-terrible, but her answering whatever question she had wished she was asked and general issue dodging was horrendous. (And the "I'm not going to answer the question, I'm here to talk to the AMERICAN PEOPLE" -- plbbt, that's what political advertising is for, you're in a DAMN MODERATED DEBATE, give the sloganeering a rest for 90 seconds.)

"The great insight of the Palin VP choice is that huge chunks of American voters no longer even demand that their candidates actually have policy positions; they simply consume them as media entertainment, rooting for or against them according to the reflexive prejudices of their demographic, as they would for reality-show contestants or sitcom characters."

Like I twittered the other day, when I write Josh, the American living in Japan I got to <a href="/2008/03/29">visit last March</a> I find myself switching to more Japan-English stylings... I wrote "please enjoy this book" for "I hope you enjoy this book", and in general there's a deference thing going on.

I also like when encountering little bits of India English... today part of our offshore QA team asked me to "Please do the needful" for what an American would write as "Please do what needs to be done". The India version is more concise! Also, my Aunt has mentioned that she's had to learn not mark down the Indian phrase "According to me..." in places where an American would use "in my opinion..."

I have a general rule that after Boston, cities I've lived in or near get the nod for sports loyalties. (Hence a bit of a soft spot for the Indians and the Browns.) And, lo and behold, I was born in Philly and lived there for like 3 months. So thtat trumps any "American League" or AL East loyalty I might otherwise feel.

My fellow Americans, the time for running aimlessly through streets while shrieking and waving our arms above our heads is now. I understand that many of you are worried about your economic future and our situation overseas, and you have every right to be. Yet there is only one thing we as a nation can do in times like these: give up all hope and devolve into a lawless, post-apocalyptic, every-man-for-himself society.

Just to further some thoughts I originally twittered...watched some of Obama's infomercial. Who was the last guy to try that, Ross Perot maybe? I hope it builds up people's familiarity with him. On the one hand it seems odd that McCain doesn't get a symmetrical rejoinder. On the other hand, McCain isn't trying to leap a racial boundary in American politics.

Watching Obama: lesson learned, "real americans" are kinda heavy.

Yesterday I stopped at a combination Long John Silver / Taco Bell, in part because I hadn't seen that combination before. (KFC seems to be the usual Taco Bell pairing.) I realized I have this secret hope of finding an American equivalent of <a href="http://www.nordsee.de/en/flash.jsc">Nordsee</a>, this brilliant German fastfood chain, offering a big variety of fish sandwiches on interesting breads.

BoingBoing also thought it was amusing to <a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2008/12/14/arab-shoetossing-isn.html">mock the articles pointing out that it wasn't a friendly gesture</a>, but I'm not sure Americans get the symbolism I'm told is there.

France in "American Dad", planning for some time travel to the 70s

<i>Thank You and OK! An American Zen Failure in Japan</i>,

<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Thank-You-Ok-American-Failure/dp/1590304705/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230835545&sr=1-3">Thank You and OK! An American Zen Failure in Japan</a> was a bit long, but an interesting study in "West Coast" Zen and its more traditinal practice.

By the 1960s, the average American was producing twice as much as only fifteen years before. In theory at least, people could now afford to work a four-hour day, or two-and-a-half-day week, or six-month year and still maintain a standard of living equivalent to that enjoyed by people in 1950 when life was already pretty good--and arguably, in terms of stress and distraction and sense of urgency, in many respects much better. Instead, and almost uniquely among developed nations, Americans took none of the productivity gains in additional leisure. We decided to work and buy and have instead.

Good: Use of the economical term "Black" instead of "African-American". Bad: Damn it, Dow, stand up with a little support here, jerkies.

<a href="http://klausler.com/cargo.html">http://klausler.com/cargo.html</a> - the "American Cargo Cult". A bit facile, but some good points, esp. re: celebrity and "authority"

For way too long on my todo I meant to mention that one kind of hokey, faux-American Indian story, about someone who has two wolves that are fighting... the way I heard it first is one is hope, the other fear, and the question is, if they're fighting, which one wins, and the answer is "the one you feed".

Cool Ranch Doritos are labeled 'Cool American' [in Iceland]

Looking at the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R8WS-j7SKA">Dallas Original Intro</a> - it seems kind of weird how it fetishizes the city and American Big Oil.

<i>--I very talented artist I know online, Harvey James, put the <a href="http://harveyjames.livejournal.com/123664.html">real life adventure of Oh Daphny</a> and got it published in <a href="http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n3/htdocs/comics-harvey-james-760.php?source=homepagefeature">Vice magazine</a>. Warning: the story is a bit horrific and brutal at its core, the kind of thing you might not have realized can happen in an American local jail.</i>

BTW, how lame is it that Europe had a single "0" to give the house an edge, and some bright American came up with... "00"? That's some yankee ingenuity (but lack of class) right there, boy howdy.

<a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2217604/">http://www.slate.com/id/2217604/</a> - nice gallery on American West photography, though it seemed to lose its thesis.

<blockquote class="quote">As for the Europe thing: I'd much rather have American Taxation than European Taxation. (see <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20060207223658/http://www.timbro.se/bokhandel/pdf/9175665646.pdf">http://www.timbro.se/bokhandel/pdf/9175665646.pdf</a> [2019 Update: Wayback Machine Link] to see why.)</blockquote>

<blockquote class="quote">The higher level of retail consumption means that the Americans have more 'gizmos' than Europeans</blockquote>

As little as a hundred years ago, much of the American continent was virgin wilderness. Today, a hundred years later, the USA has completely overtaken Europe to become

the unrivalled leader of the world economy. Most Americans have a standard of living

American regions have nearly twice the affluence of Europe. It is worth reminding ourselves what this means. In these regions the average American can get exactly twice as

HAHA, Wow. At first I was going to put "In these regions the average American can get exactly twice as much of everything as the average European." right after that "gizmos" line as pointing out the crazy bias of this kind of research, but... jeez, do you think maybe BEING a "virgin wilderness" (<i>2019 Update: or at least unindustrialized - <a href="https://kottke.org/19/05/the-persistent-myth-of-the-empty-american-frontier">conservatives tend to downplay the fact Europeans were not moving into unoccupied places</a></i>) - they and having tons of natural resource to exploit, rather than having supported centuries of relatively crowded growth, might actually be a net plus when it comes to making a century of economic progress? Or maybe having relatively docile neighbors and big wide oceans and not getting bombed nightly in giant World Wars?

<i>UPDATE: and the more I think about it... "average American" seems to be playing into that fallacy that tends to think of "average" when "median" would be more appropriate! 99 hobos plus Bill Gates is on average a really rich guy, but the median is still "just a bum". What weasel words, especially when framed with a pompous "it is worth reminding ourselves what this means."

<blockquote class="quote">The media image of the American poor is that they have great difficulties to

<blockquote class="quote">The average American household has a home that is

more crowded in an American perspective.</blockquote>

The next section starts talking about "Americans work harder", but the LS ratio seems like an odd duck:

More to the point, I don't know if I trust this metric and its muddling of unemployment with, you know, how many hours and how hard and long Americans vs Europeans are working, and the quality of life is issues that I find most interesting.

<a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-do-we-swear">http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-do-we-swear</a> - swearing cam mitigate pain - it seems amazing to me that cussing is neurologically distinctive. It's almost as if we had swearing before we had language...

insects is to have strong body odor. There hasn't been a good=looking American

I can't even tell you how much I love Germans doing American Cowboy.

<br>Random Portugal: I think the European standard plug might make more sense than the American/Japan. It just seems more durable.

<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTfWTqQ0dM">Word Up</a> (Boss Hoss) <i>--Like I mighta mentioned, only the second example of <a href="http://kisrael.com/2008/12/27/">Germans singing like American Cowboys</a> I have in my collection.</i>

There's a profound statement in American consumerism in how a 2-liter costs less than most 20 oz bottles, and both cost less than most water

<i>American Beauty</i>,

<i>The Big Lebowski</i>, <i>American Beauty</i>, <i>Rosencrantz + Guldernstern are Dead</i> are all classics.

Man, "OK" is such a great Americanism, our linguistic gift to the world. Just a nice understated expression of positive sentiment.

The American was good natured, generous, hospitable and social, and he reversed the whole history of language to make the term 'stranger' one of welcome.

In what are they created equal? Is it in size, strength, understanding, figure, moral or civil accomplishments, or situation of life? Every plough-man knows that they are not created equal in any of these. All men, it is true, are equally created, but what is this to the purpose? It certainly is no reason why the Americans should turn rebels.

Amber on the American side of Niagara Falls

I wonder if Canada Dry is called American Dry up in Canada. I should've checked.

<a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/faith/heaven-a-fools-paradise-1949399.html">http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/faith/heaven-a-fools-paradise-1949399.html</a> - it is pretty amazing that our concept of heaven is so new and so widely held by Americans.

i'm amused that some white guy referred to the process of americanizing an asian film with white actors and such as 'honking it up'.

Harvey Pekar is dead! Bigger loss for Cleveland than LeBron, IMO. American Splendor was so great, wonder about stories left to tell...

<i>--via "One-Night Stands with American History", Shenkman + Reiger</i>

<a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=rapid-thinking-makes-people-happy">http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=rapid-thinking-makes-people-happy</a> -- maybe my scatterbrain is self-medication!

<a href="http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/c8863726da/judd-apatow-psa">http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/c8863726da/judd-apatow-psa</a> - surprisingly funny plug for the American Jewish World Service...

<a href="http://crummy.com">Leonard was visiting</a>, up from NYC, and we decided to take an impromptu field trip to Funspot, home of the American Classic Arcade Museum,

two Irish flag decals then an American flag sticker with "No Vacancy" over it.

<a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2278923/">http://www.slate.com/id/2278923/</a> - Americans exaggerate their church attendance- side effect of a conflating of morality and religion. Duh.

One-Night Stands with American History,

<i>Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840-1918</i></font><br><br>

The (inside) outer wall of the new American Wing of the MFA.

<a href="http://idle.slashdot.org/story/11/03/07/1655249/Hungary-Uses-iPad-To-Draft-New-Constitution">Hungary Uses iPad To Draft New Constitution</a> -- this must seem like sacrilege to so many Americans, who take their government as they take their religion, from static old tomes, "holy (and wholly) writ"

Sorry for the poor scan... it's from "The Big Book of New American Humor", a giant yellow tome from 1990 that was wildly influential on me in high school... I often see it at half-priced book places (like the basement of the Harvard Book Store) and it's well worth the price of admission.

Bin Laden is finally dead. It's amazing what Americans can do when the Playstation Network is down.

<i>--More <a href="http://twentytwowords.com/2011/05/12/22-examples-of-defaced-u-s-currency-or-should-that-be-refaced/">fun with American currency</a></i>

I have only been cursed by Americans. They are sharp-witted and very articulated and yet very free with their anger.

Call center worker in a Mother Jones piece on <a href="http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/05/indian-call-center-americanization">an American at an Indian call center</a>

via "The Big Book of American Humor", a huge formative influence on me in high school.

Also on Friday we went to the Wester Reserve Historical Society where they have a lovely selection of old cars, and this american icon in the lobby...

Perfecting the model of selling design that is compatible with big business, Foster simultaneously grew one of the largest architecture practices in the world while still winning awards for design excellence. The secret was to design buildings like the limited edition, invite only Porsches that Foster drove and fellow Porsche drivers would commission them. Jobs went further, however, he managed to create products that were designed like Porsches and made them available to everyone, via High Tech that transcended stylistic elements. An Apple product really was high technology and its form followed function, it went beyond the Porsche analogy by being truly fit for purpose in a way that a Porsche couldn't, being a car designed for a speed that you weren't allowed to drive. Silicon Valley capitalism had arguably delivered what the Soviets had dreamed of and failed, modernism for the masses. An iPhone really is the best phone you can buy at any price. To paraphrase Andy Warhol: Lady Gaga uses an iPhone, and just think, you can have an iPhone too. An iPhone is an iPhone and no amount of money can get you a better phone. This was what American modernism was about.

<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4s6H4ku6ZY">Like A G6</a> Far East Movement. I kind of resisted liking this song, 'cause singing in praise of a private jet seemed a bit rich, but it's super-catchy, and kind of cool that they're about the first Asian-American group to get a top 10 hit on the mainstream charts.

<a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guilty-planet/2011/09/18/back-to-school-teaching-evolution/">Throwback Parent and High School Biology Teacher</a>

AMERICANS. Today's date is 11/11/11, not 11/11/11.

In the early-2000s, an apathy-starved American culture took the "eh" from their northerly neighbors, added an "m", and came up with today's most important phrase of indifference: "meh"

Benjamin Nugent, "American Nerd"

<font color="red">The Big Book of American Humor</font>,

The Soloflex Story: An American Parable,

American Nerd,

<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHxOego2Sso">The Guitar</a> Guy Clark. Daniel Vogelmann mentioned some of his American cowboy influences, including Guy Clark, so I checked it out. A bit like a softer and more haunting "Devil Went Down to Georgia"

<a href="http://mightygodking.com/index.php/2012/03/05/the-politics-of-star-wars/">http://mightygodking.com/index.php/2012/03/05/the-politics-of-star-wars/</a> - Star Wars' roots in Nixon and Vietnam. (And how Americans always think they're the good guys.)

Neil deGrasse Tyson, American astrophysicist and science communicator, and heir apparent to Carl Sagan.

I guess some of this mad right-wing love comes from the idea that in America, anyone can become a Rich Guy if he just works hard and saves his pennies. Mitt Romney has said, in effect, "I'm rich and I don't apologize for it." Nobody wants you to, Mitt. What some of us want--those who aren't blinded by a lot of bullshit persiflage thrown up to mask the idea that rich folks want to keep their damn money--is for you to acknowledge that you couldn't have made it in America without America. That you were fortunate enough to be born in a country where upward mobility is possible (a subject upon which Barack Obama can speak with the authority of experience), but where the channels making such upward mobility possible are being increasingly clogged. That it's not fair to ask the middle class to assume a disproportionate amount of the tax burden. Not fair? It's un-fucking-American is what it is. I don't want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share. That our civics classes never taught us that being American means that--sorry, kiddies--you're on your own. That those who have received much must be obligated to pay--not to give, not to "cut a check and shut up," in Governor Christie's words, but to pay--in the same proportion. That's called stepping up and not whining about it. That's called patriotism, a word the Tea Partiers love to throw around as long as it doesn't cost their beloved rich folks any money.</blockquote>

At the risk of repeating myself, here's what rich folks do when they get richer: they invest. A lot of those investments are overseas, thanks to the anti-American business policies of the last four administrations.

<a href="http://boingboing.net/2012/05/27/an-american-on-the-eurovision.html">http://boingboing.net/2012/05/27/an-american-on-the-eurovision.html</a> - writeup of Eurovision. I dig the idea of it so much, even if I only like 1 in 10 songs of it...

<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ2np7R-Uwg">North American Scum</a>

Today I heard of two interesting East/West cultural differences; <br><br>1. Asked an open ended question about journaling and photo-albums, many of the European say they'd journal to remember happy times but the central theme from the Asian students was avoiding repeating mistakes.<br><br>2. In visual identification test, there seems to be a cultural difference with the American subjects picking out the most central foreground object (and able to recognize it more quickly in different contexts) and Japanese subjects absorbing scenes more holistically, and having an easier time with questions about the aggregate whole. (And 9 months of living in the other country seemed to reverse the difference, which says really interesting things about neuroplasticity.)<br><br>You don't want to take too much out of such uncited tidbits, but still.

<a href="http://postmasculine.com/america">10 Things Most Americans Don't Know About America</a>

I liked how the London Olympics opening had a tribute to the National Health, but I wondered if they were showing off to the Americans

<a href="http://gizmodo.com/5930450/all-the-american-flags-on-the-moon-are-now-white">http://gizmodo.com/5930450/all-the-american-flags-on-the-moon-are-now-white</a> The USA flags on the moon are now UV bleached white. Which makes poetic sense, seeing as how we gave up on the moon

<blockquote class="quote">A U.S. soldier stands in the middle of rubble in the Monument of the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig after they attacked the city on April 18, 1945. The huge monument commemorating the defeat of Napoleon in 1813 was one of the last strongholds in the city to surrender. One hundred and fifty SS fanatics with ammunition and foodstuffs stored in the structure to last three months dug themselves in and were determined to hold out as long as their supplies. American First Army artillery eventually blasted the SS troops into surrender.</blockquote>

<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8KFmArXzzU">Northern Cree - Red Skin Girl</a> (A Tribe Called Red) Love this group's mix of Native American and modern sensibilities.

EB on a bit of a tear at the hardware store- so little made in USA, even the "Vermont American" (R) rand is made in China. #usafail

I'm reading a book of Nicholson Baker's essay, and in his review of "The Historical Dictonary of American Slang" he says he spent several hours assembling the following matrix:

<li>Giant Dwarf (The Exploding Voids) I literally might be these Germans #1 American Fan, but the stuff isn't released yet.

<a href="http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/virginia-republicans-give-blacks-finger-mlk-day">http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/virginia-republicans-give-blacks-finger-mlk-day</a> -- wow. I wonder why so many African-Americans don't dig the Republicans. Maybe because Republicans can act ABSOLUTELY reprehensibly?

I like Wikiepdia's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_words_not_widely_used_in_the_United_States">British Words Not Widely Used in the USA</a>. The difference in vocabulary has always intrigued me (and that list seems so much cooler than <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_words_not_widely_used_in_the_United_Kingdom">the Reverse</a>

"Sorry, I don't really follow American hip hop."<br>

(There's a seeming contradiction here -- 6 years ago I was looking at a Scientific American article about kids who get the idea that intelligence is innate and fixed, and so the important thing is to always look smart. ( <a href="http://kirk.is/2007/11/30/">http://kirk.is/2007/11/30/</a> ) You might think that would lead them to self-confidence, an unassailable bit of ego core, but instead it brings on fear and strategies to avoid looking like anything less, like a mere mortal. And I think that's because if they (and me) aren't the greatest then they are worth nothing.)<br>

Always looking for that outside perspective, I was fascinated by the Quota on <a href="http://www.quora.com/How-Americans-Are-Different/What-facts-about-the-United-States-do-foreigners-not-believe-until-they-come-to-America">What facts about the United States do foreigners not believe until they come to America?</a>

Edwin Taylor, former editor of the <i>American Journal of Physics</i>, at my UUSS group last night.

The Guardian on that <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/sport/shortcuts/2013/oct/08/washington-redskins-name-racist-obama">American Football team from DC with the racist name</a>

<a href="http://www.footballasfootball.com/">http://www.footballasfootball.com/</a> American Football Teams logos redone as International futbol Team logos... I love design work like that, like there was a real history of being a football club.

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue... Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.

<a href="http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2013/12/25/were-the-good-guys/">http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2013/12/25/were-the-good-guys/</a> Thoughtful, non-hyperbolic piece on the new American Exceptionalism in the CIA and elsewhere.

There's a strong parallel with the ending of "American Beauty"

When citizens of this country approach their government, they do so only as Americans, not as a members of one faith or another. And that means that even in a partly legislative body, they should not confront government-sponsored worship that divides them along religious lines.

Watching some Futbol. For everything Americans don't dig about it-- the scarcity of scoring, the flopping-- the lack of time-outs is pretty awesome. The game is 90 minutes, with the 15 minute halftime and then a few extra minutes at the end, free of baseballs and football's start and stop, no strategic timeouts, none of basketball's endless fouls to end a match, etc etc. And no time for commercials... probably to the sport's finances detriment in this country.

from H.L. Mencken's <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/185/a1.html">The Declaration of Independence in American</a>, this bit is the translation of "We hold these truths to be self-evident..."

Quora on <a href="http://www.quora.com/What-are-untold-secret-or-not-so-obvious-social-rules-in-American-or-Western-society">the social rules of American / Western societies</a>. I like this kind of analysis.

<span class='star3'>Broken Flowers</span>, <span class='star3'>Elf</span>, <span class='star4'>Iron Sky</span>, <span class='star3'>Tokyo Godfathers</span>, <span class='star3'>About Last Night</span>, <span class='star5'>Backbeat</span>, <span class='star5'>Run Lola Run</span>, <span class='star3'>The Way Things Go</span>, <span class='star3'>9</span>, <span class='star3'>Indie Game: The Movie</span>, <span class='star3'>Nymphomaniac Pt 1</span>, <span class='star2'>Nymphomaniac Pt 2</span>, <span class='star3'>Breath of the Gods</span>, <span class='star3'>Pulp Fiction</span>, <span class='star3'>Grosse Pointe Blank</span>, <span class='star3'>Say Anything</span>, <span class='star3'>The Thieves</span>, <span class='star3'>Orange is the New Black Season 2</span>, <span class='star3'>Buried Alive</span>, <span class='star4'>The Sunset Limited</span>, <span class='star3'>Wolf of Wall Street</span>, <span class='star3'>Jim Gaffigan: Mr. Universe</span>, <span class='star4'>Nick Offerman: American Ham</span>

<span class='star4'>Stuck in the Middle with You</span>, <span class='star3'>I Wear the Black Hat</span>, <span class='star4'>A Working Theory of Love</span>, <span class='star3'>Expanded Universe</span>, <span class='star3'>Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us </span>, <span class='star3'>The Uncle Book</span>, <span class='star3'>Everything That Remains</span>, <span class='star3'>One More Thing</span>, <span class='star2'>Breathing Machines - a Memoir of Computers</span>, <span class='star3'>Desert Days (Meat + Greet)</span>, <span class='star2'>March of the Morons</span>, <span class='star4'>RESTful Web APIs</span>, <span class='star5'>Axiomatic</span>, <span class='star3'>Design Crazy</span>, <span class='star3'>Luminous</span>, <span class='star4'>Oceanic</span>, <span class='star4'>This Is How You Say Goodbye: A Daughter's Memoir</span>, <span class='star3'>Raising Steam</span>, <span class='star2'>Flatland</span>, <span class='star3'>One Summer: America, 1927</span>, <span class='star5'>Stories of your Life and Others</span>, <span class='star4'>God is Disappointed in You</span>, <span class='star2'>The Lifecycle of Software Objects</span>, <span class='star4'>The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate</span>, <span class='star2'>The Weirdness</span>, <span class='star4'>NAVMC 2616 Unit Leaders Personal Response Handbook</span>, <span class='star3'>How About Never--Is Never Good for You?: My Life in Cartoons</span>, <span class='star3'>We Are Still Married</span>, <span class='star3'>ZZT</span>, <span class='star3'>Think Like a Freak</span>, <span class='star3'>The Word Exchange</span>, <span class='star3'>Mapping Our Salvationist DNA</span>, <span class='star3'>Defining the World</span>, <span class='star2'>Galaga</span>, <span class='star3'>Will Rogers: Wise and Witty Sayings of the Great American Humorist</span>, <span class='star4'>Tibetan Peach Pie</span>, <span class='star3'>Weird Al Yankovic Interviews</span>, <span class='star4'>If This Isn't Nice, What Is?</span>, <span class='star3'>Sex from Scratch</span>, <span class='star4'>Hardcore Zen</span>, <span class='star3'>Jagged Alliance 2</span>, <span class='star3'>I Murdered My Library</span>, <span class='star3'>Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception</span>, <span class='star3'>Wetlands</span>, <span class='star3'>A Man Without a Country</span>, <span class='star4'>Chubster: A Hipster's Guide to Losing Weight While Staying Cool</span>, <span class='star3'>An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge</span>, <span class='star4'>The Mysterious Stranger</span>, <span class='star3'>Midpoint and Other Poems</span>, <span class='star3'>Super Mario Bros 2</span>, <span class='star3'>Why Does the World Exist?</span>, <span class='star3'>Mindfulness</span>, <span class='star3'>How Not to Calm a Child on a Plane</span>, <span class='star3'>Wishful Drinking</span>, <span class='star3'>The Two Cultures</span>, <span class='star3'>Not That Kind of Girl</span>, <span class='star3'>The Secret History of Star Wars</span>, <span class='star3'>A Sense of the Mysterious</span>, <span class='star3'>The Way the World Works</span>, <span class='star3'>The Meaning of Human Existence</span>, <span class='star4'>what if?</span>

The reason for this is not so much an inherent American goodness--although I would argue that our motives in world affairs are generally more altruistic than those of most other large nations--but because of our unique position as a liberal democratic superpower that embraces an aspirational, rather than ethnic or confessional, national identity.

James Kirchick, writing in Slate on <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/06/how_fifa_explains_the_world_america_is_the_only_country_that_could_take.html">the FIFA takedown</a> and in defense of American hegemony and exceptionalism.

Slate on African-American English and the <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2015/06/05/the_habitual_be_why_cookie_monster_be_eating_cookies_whether_he_is_eating.html">Habitual Be</a>.

(Ironic that the thumbnail uses an American flag, because it's not hard to see how lightly the USA got off, relatively speaking.)<br>

<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/06/thank-you-culture-india-america/395069/">India does not have the knee-jerk "Thank You" that the USA has</a>. Sort of like "Have a Good Day", I didn't realize this kind of Thank You is not universal. On the one hand, of course the American "Thank You" can run a little shallow, but I also think it is reasonably heartfelt. An Indian coworker accepts my armchair culture analysis that India emphasizes roles and structure and what you "should do", while the USA has that "rugged individualism" tradition, so the "Thank You"s are a recognition that "I recognize you didn't have to do that, so thanks". <br>

I was thinking about this snippet some African-American kids would sing around my high school gym class: "I don't care what the White Man say, Santa Claus is a Black Man"<br>

'Americans always have such a lot of misdirected party spirit,' said Gosling. 'One came to a party I gave two years ago and drank so much that he died soon after.'

Stick is so European, by which I mean: you can't do this and drive and eat a cheeseburger, that's damn near Un-American!

<a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/09/whys-gop-only-science-denying-party-on-earth.html#">Ah, the New American Exceptionalism</a>. Every developed nation has its conservatives, only ours deny climate science.

The post-apocalypse, in popular culture, often represents a macho libertarian fantasy. There's no government! Finally, we can break out the family guns. What's the appeal of the now-prolific 'zombie apocalypse' genre other than that it provides a backdrop against which Ordinary Americans can justify shooting tons and tons of people?

The Scots-Irish or "American" whites who see Trump as their champion are profoundly different from the metropolitan whites who dominate the upper echelons of U.S. society--so much so that the convention of lumping them together as "white" detracts far more from our understanding of how they fit into our society than it adds to it. J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, a forthcoming book on the place of Appalachian whites in modern America, estimates that roughly one-quarter of whites belong to the Scots-Irish tribe that has embraced Trump. If we were to separate out these Americans as a race or ethnicity unto themselves, Vance writes, we would finds rates of poverty and substance abuse that would shock our national conscience. But we don't generally collect detailed statistics on the Scots-Irish. We don't have a clear sense of how their labor force participation or disability rates compare to those of other Americans, including other white Americans. And so their experiences and their collective traumas blend into whiteness, where they can be safely ignored. Whites are privileged, after all.

"I can't stay in this room anymore without you," he said, dumping guidebooks and all sorts of junk into his suitcase. We went downstairs together, lugging our suitcases. At the desk, we lingered, paying the bill. Adrian was waiting outside. If only he'd go! But he waited. Bennett wanted to know if I had traveler's checks and my American Express card. Was I all right? He was trying to say "Stay, I love you." This was his way of saying it, but I was so bewitched that I read it to mean "Go!"

<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-secret-shame/476415/">"Nearly half of Americans would have trouble finding $400 to pay for an emergency."</a> is alarming to me. I know I make a good salary; but given that I'm not all that extravagant on rent or car and don't have a kid, I do have a bit of "where the hell DOES the money go?" I have some answers, but maybe I should double down and renew studying went Mint.com is trying to tell me.<br>

I think of Sedaris' hilarious "<a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/87/transcript">Front Row Center With Thaddeus Bristol</a>" - - where a professional theater critic brings his full guns to bear on a local elementary school Christmas Pageant. Or, worse, that real life story of a kid whose musical ambitions were quashed by a father who would almost throw her off the piano stool to show how he could do it better. <br>

Excerpts from Brady Carlson's "Dead Presidents: An American Adventure into the Strange Deaths and Surprising Afterlives of Our Nations Leaders"... I admit I didn't enjoy the book as much as I had hope but it had a few cool bits:

"I simply mean to emphasize that politics and political differences are much less important in reality for most Americans than they appear on the Internet, cable news, or in other forms of media."

<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-m_O7N1TiqM">Stadium Pow Wow (feat. Black Bear)</a> (A Tribe Called Red) Native American blend.

We can do better, and knock wood will with Hillary. It's frustrating that it all comes down to a few swing states. Even more frustrating that we've so clustered around two very different narratives of what it means to be a good, smart American.

Also, I didn't realize Southern Baptists forked away from the main Baptist body when the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society started disqualifying slave holders as missionaries.<br>

I like this quote from author and Baptist minister David Gushee: Jones says he takes the Christian Right to task for being less motivated by the gospel and more by "nostalgia for a less-religiously and morally pluralistic age, when specifically Christian practices dominated American public life in a way that is now impossible and *should* be impossible under our constitutional system."<br>

The same Gallup poll revealed that 53 percent of Americans are actually creationists. This means that despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of life and the greater antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.

I just finished Penn Jillette's "Presto!: How I Made Over 100 Pounds Disappear and Other Magical Tales". The kickstart to his losing 100 lbs was two weeks of NOTHING but potatoes, but that was mostly just to get him away from the super flavors of "SAD", the "Standard American Diet". (Then it switches to something like "Whole Plant" emphasis. It's pretty dang spartan overall.)<br>

Easy to watch but not dumbed down <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7m4ld6Bgxc">History of the American Civil War</a>.

Twenty percent of Americans describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious." Although the claim seems to annoy believers and atheists equally.

<br>Can I say, most Americans become big fans of the toilet stalls that are actually little rooms? USA stalls with their gaps and what not must seem awfully low-rent to Europeans.

<a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/08/22/american_academy_of_pediatrics_doctors_should_avoid_weight_talk_and_dieting.html">Dieting and Weight Talk Are Bad for All Adolescents, Says American Academy of Pediatrics</a> Ugh. My usual approach in talking with young people is, you know, just talking with them, kind of as a adults, and trying to take their point of view, and admitting what sucks but then discussing what you can do about it. Sounds like that kind of straightforward talk might be counter-productive about weight, which is an issue near to my heart because I have worked out strategies that more or less work for me but it's still a grind. Gotta be careful with not advising kids I play an avuncular role with, probably especially the females.

<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS04GILpifc" style="color:red;">Give It Away</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFivyZvuOKE" style="color:red;">Black Or White</a> (Dick Brave & The Backbeats) Favorite genre: Germans pretending to be American Country or Rockabilly cover bands.

Jonathan Rauch in the Atlantic's <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/how-american-politics-went-insane/485570/">How American Politics Went Insane</a>

Continuing today's theme of trying to understand American politics, and even with empathy to the "other side": <a href="http://www.vox.com/2016/9/6/12803636/arlie-hochschild-strangers-land-louisiana-trump">What a liberal sociologist learned from spending five years in Trump's America</a><br>

Tammy Duckworth herself is a purple heart veteran who lost both legs co-piloting a helicopter that was attacked by an RPG in Iraq. Her father's side has an American military tradition going back to the Revolutionary War, but <a href="http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/senator-mark-kirk-mocks-tammy-duckworths-mixed-race-bac-1788310472">Mark Kirk thinks he can go for the jugular by pointing out she's asian</a>, and of course those people didn't fight with George Washington. Such commanding snark!<br>

The one thing most Americans can agree on is that a large portion of the population seems to be trying to destroy the country. We just can't agree on which portion it is.

Scott Meyer (of <a href="http://www.basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2016/11/1/how-to-prevent-any-progress-the-american-method">Basic Instructions</a>)<br>

<a href="http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/07/10/when-and-why-nationalism-beats-globalism/">When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism</a>. I'd prefer to be a citizen of the world myself, but we need to understand people who put nation over humanity. And sometimes there's something to be said for the view in the United States, there are many things we get right, and paths to improvement. Unfortunately the white-america first got this know-nothing elected.

<figcaption>The clanhouses in general made me think about Mutual Aid Societies, like the ones in New Orleans. They kind of go against the grain of American Rugged Individualism... in thinking about what some Trump Voter defenders say about the relative neglect of rural communities... I dunno. Food for thought.</figcaption>

Americans now spend more money on casino gambling than on music purchases and going to movies and sports events combined

If you believe in the sovereignty of the United States, but support forced incursions on Native American lands, you are a hypocrite. <br>

If you believe that we deserve life, liberty and happiness, but support taking away healthcare from millions of Americans, you are a hypocrite. <br>

If you believe in equal rights under the law, but don't support marriage equality and non discrimination for LGBTQ Americans, you are a hypocrite. <br>

If you are an American but think dissent is disrespectful, you are a hypocrite. <br>

<a href="http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/3/23/14988084/white-middle-class-dying-faster-explained-case-deaton">The American White Middle Class Dying Faster Explained.</a> It's not happening in other developed countries. We're also further to the right politically than almost all of them. This is not a coincidence.

<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsK9Sd9956U">Ndn Stakes (feat. Sitting Bear)</a> (A Tribe Called Red) Saw these guys live, always dig the blend of classic Indigenous American sounds and modern stuff.

via "The Big Book of New American Humor", got in high school and have loved it ever since. Anyway, both that thing about the nectarine - it IS a hell of a fruit, and the advice about buses hops into my head whenever I'm looking for a piece of fruit or trying to catch public transportation.

<a href="https://theoutline.com/post/1409/saxophones-in-american-pop-music-history">WHERE DID ALL THE SAXOPHONES GO?</a> "How one instrument went from being the backbone of American popular music to being a punchline in a joke about the '80s." Reminds me of my <a href="http://kirk.is/2004/11/09/">2004 rant about saxophones as the most overrated instrument</a>. I disavow most of that now - I was just a bitter tuba player who hadn't played tuba in like 8 years.

<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbtPXFlZlHg">Talk Dirty (feat. 2 Chainz)</a> (Jason Derulo) There was that article <a href="https://theoutline.com/post/1409/saxophones-in-american-pop-music-history">Where Did All The Saxes Go</a> that mentioned this as a recent example of quick riff sax, along with Macklemore.

via <a href="http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/i-want-this-1923-prediction-for-the-american-city-of-th-1796124676">I Want This 1923 Prediction For the American City of the Future To Be Real</a>

5 Presidents had never been elected to public office before becoming President: Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, Herbert Hoover, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Donald Trump. Hoover had formerly served as Secretary of Commerce, an appointed office. Taylor, Grant and Eisenhower had never held political office prior to their presidencies, but they had served as leading American generals in the Mexican-American War, American Civil War and World War Two, respectively.<br>

Telling quote: "Many great American soldiers, both of the North and South, died at this spot" - an earlier form of that "both sides" shtick we've heard from him lately.<br>

<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAxaTMVW1f0mn,">Chant: 13th Hour</a> (Redbone) Interesting Native American group that (suspiciously?) had more success in Europe than here. I do dig songs that bring in historically native acoustic elements...

Kottke pointed out how great <a href="http://www.wfaa.com/sports/nfl/dale-hansen-unplugged-national-anthem-protests-flag-nfl/478596561">Dale Hansen's take on Trump's response to the NFL protestors</a> is:<blockquote class="quote">Donald Trump has said he supports a peaceful protest because it's an American's right... But not this protest, and there's the problem: The opinion that any protest you don't agree with is a protest that should be stopped.<br>

Martin Luther King should have marched across a different bridge. Young, black Americans should have gone to a different college and found a different lunch counter. And college kids in the 60's had no right to protest an immoral war.<br>

They, and all of us, should protest how black Americans are treated in this country. And if you don't think white privilege is a fact, you don't understand America.</blockquote>

<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/is-trump-ending-the-american-era/537888/">How Trump Is Ending the American Era</a>. One point I hadn't thought of, for people who liked his being a businessman, and thought it a plus- someone "who has spent a career in charge of a small, family-run corporation without shareholders [isn't] likely to pay much attention to external views." Even with the premise that a someone strong in business (which is a dubious description in Trump's case; he's more of a study in the power of marketing and branding, powered in large part by the mellifluous name his grandfather had to replace "Drumpf") brings something good to the political table, there would be more to if that personal history involved being accountable to external stakeholders, outside a narrow little circle of family and sycophants.

<a href="https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/597/one-last-thing-before-i-go">One Last Thing Before I Go</a> - fantastic radio episode / podcast by This America Life. Hearing about the "Phone of the Wind" was moving.

Kurt Vonnegut to the American Psychiatric Association in 1988

High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.

Latest decluttering thought: WaPo on the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/home/americans-are-pack-rats-swedes-have-the-solution-death-cleaning/2017/10/12/248dcf82-aebe-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html?utm_medium=email&utm_source=nextdraft&utm_term=.fa60af38a519">upcoming book "The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning."</a><br>

In the end I appreciate Haidt's attempt to reconcile and appreciate what both Conservative and Liberals bring to the culture, but I think he's a little too kind to Conservatives. There are tough-to-reconcile contradictions with the Conservative "foundations" of sanctity and authority with diverse cultures (again the same contradiction that drove me from evangelical Christianity). I would say that he shows why Liberals need to wave the flag more and emphasize the E Pluribus Unum, and how being a real American is accepting the diversity. But all those diverse groups also need to signal their affection for that greater group project.<br>

I suppose to people who like that Colonial look, IKEA stuff just looks cheap (and it can be... I mean there's no way it was meant to be moved around from apartment to apartment in the way Americans use it) and dorm-ish, while the Colonial stuff is true class... not stodgy and boring as it seems to me. As usual, I suspect a red/blue split on that, and correlations with politics etc.

To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain 'the last best hope of earth' for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.

Liberals: the subtext of the footer is right. "American" is a special concept - we are a unique experiment in the world, and a special blend, and we need to foster a kind of patriotism. We need to be clear about our unifying concepts of liberty and freedom and justice and opportunities and concepts that unite us as a nation. E pluribus unum.

Yesterday at Quincy's Christmas Parade I saw these<a href="http://www.thefirestore.com/store/product.aspx/productId/31872/selectedVariationId/138972/Thin-Red-Thin-Blue-Line-Black-White-American-Flag-3-x-5-?utm_source=google&utm_campaign=google&utm_content=138972&utm_medium=cpc&gclid=Cj0KCQiAjO_QBRC4ARIsAD2FsXOfQyVg0Xy3kIDuhPYvr9uL4Rbh9LxKMZT8BNJDNh9X92mfPZ4hNsEaAr-yEALw_wcB"> black and white American flags (with a blue/red stripe to shout out to police and fire departments)</a> for sale by those shopping-cart-based vendors who show up along side parades and fairs.<br>

I guess the American model is putting all our eggs in the Tony Stark / Ayn Rand-hero type genius who manages to have big long-shot ambition despite the capitalist desire for quarterly profit, the most notable example being Elon Musk.<br>

"No thanks, <a href="http://bigthink.com/in-their-own-words/exploring-the-most-enigmatic-line-in-american-literature">I'd prefer not to.</a>"<br>

<a href="https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/forecast-for-sex-by-50-when-you-are-a-46-year-old-black-woman">Forecast for Sex By 50 When You Are a 46-Year-Old Black Woman</a> This is sweet and brilliant. It reminds me of all the great African-American literature I got to read in college. (Admittedly I was initially driven by looking for double credits for my English major and my school's "world cultures" requirement, but it was great stuff.)<br>

So <a href="https://kf-site-production.s3.amazonaws.com/publications/pdfs/000/000/242/original/KnightFoundation_AmericansViews_Client_Report_010917_Final_Updated.pdf">reading the damn PDF</a> -- Politico is attributing to Democrats what the chart in the PDF says is Independents??? The numbers for Democrats are 17% always, 55% sometimes, 25% never<br>

<li><a style="color:red;" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic5vxw3eijY">American Boy (feat. Kanye West)</a> (Estelle) Guess I'm late to the party with this, but it's so catchy.

From the Atlantic - <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/making-athens-great-again/517791/">Making Athens Great Again</a> - charts some interesting parallels with Athenian and American Exceptionalism...

In many ways, the United States is not at the forefront of the Enlightenment project, even though the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution were the earliest and greatest gifts of the Enlightenment. The United States was conceived as an Enlightenment nation, but it always entertained counter-Enlightenment forces of cultures of honor; of manly self-defense; of a kind of millennial, quasi-religious, messianic role of the United States in particular as the indispensable nation, the city upon the hill--both very counter-Enlightenment notions.

Hmm. <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2018/03/exercise-is-as-effective-as-antidepressants-for-many-cases-of-depression.html">Exercise can be a very effective way to treat depression. So why don't American doctors prescribe it?</a>

Two things that [American Nazis] love: silence and violence.<br>

Mark Twain wrote some parody lyrics based on American Imperialism in the Phillipines:<br>

So while my friends spent their days at Missoula Elementary I stayed home and learned to write the American language.<br>

Been dabbling with podcasts, including some from outside my echo chamber. Joe Rogan had some NRA youtuber dude Colion Noir, a bit more interesting than some demographically, since he's African American. Didn't listen to all of it (I think I prefer retrogaming podcasts' backlog, tbh) but I guess their take on the old "guns don't kill people" trope is the "there's all this fuss about INANIMATE OBJECTS".<br>

Interesting take given the whole <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/">Atlantic The 9.9% is the new American Aristocracy article</a> making the rounds, and making me rethink some of my assumptions. I guess I'll be back to the correct answer is "it's complicated". You can never fully evaluate merit, you can never remove chance and circumstance on the path from merit to reward, you never want to fully disregard talent in terms of providing opportunity.

Our best bet, actually our only realistic bet, is to mobilize the vote. There has always been a silver lining to this situation. I have always hesitated to state it, for fear of sounding like I am not taking the horror seriously. Fuck that; I do. But there has always been the possibility, there remains the possibility, that this is a time when our country faces up to its worst reflection, sees it truly, and breaks the fucking mirror. A time when the last bastion of white power and male supremacy and oligarchy attempts to enact fascism, but the antibodies of the American system and American multi-culturalism kick in to reject it.<br>

<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBEIDB0V4aI">American Pharaoh</a> (Jase Harley) Song that influenced "This is America".

It might be good advice but man, that guy's <a href="https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-untold-story-of-napoleon-hill-the-greatest-self-he-1789385645">history as a classic American huckster is amazing</a>

Happy Palindrome Day to my American friends. Which is most of them. Oh and me.

Gen Daniel "Chappie" James Jr., USAF, the first African American to reach the rank of four-star General.

Liz introduced me to this <a href="https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/everything-is-alive/">episode of "99% Invisible"</a> helping to launch a new podcast, <a href="https://www.radiotopia.fm/podcasts/everything-is-alive">Everything is Alive</a>. The podcast feels like a shadow of Shintoism, it gives inanimate objects voices and then interviews them. The premiere episode interviews a can of generic cola named Louis, and the unscripted dialogue ends up feeling like a very funny style parody of the "This American Life" genre - but it actually made me a bit verklempt. <br>

But, I'd like to explore more of, say, American History, weight/year wise than just the time since JFK. Maybe the Civil War.

Having just finished Zora Neale Hurston's "Mules and Men" and its study of African American folklore, I'm sort of fascinated by Froggy the Gremlin as a trickster figure. The shtick is him having these hypnotic powers, and he injects a comment or command into the human's story or lesson, and the human has to go with it - but just for a moment, and then they rage at Froggy for throwing a curveball into the narrative.

The biggest and most frightening impact of the AI revolution might be on the relative efficiency of democracies and dictatorships. Historically, autocracies have faced crippling handicaps in regard to innovation and economic growth. In the late 20th century, democracies usually outperformed dictatorships, because they were far better at processing information. We tend to think about the conflict between democracy and dictatorship as a conflict between two different ethical systems, but it is actually a conflict between two different data-processing systems. Democracy distributes the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. Given 20th-century technology, it was inefficient to concentrate too much information and power in one place. Nobody had the ability to process all available information fast enough and make the right decisions. This is one reason the Soviet Union made far worse decisions than the United States, and why the Soviet economy lagged far behind the American economy.

Yeah the word became "old fashioned" when we beat the "National Socialists" aka Nazis, you dog-whistling ass. If you were actually a patriot you'd be ok just calling yourself an American.

I made a <a href="https://toys.alienbill.com/wator/">version of a semi-famous computer program from Scientific American's "Computer Recreations" column, WA-TOR<br>

I dig my name, first name especially - "Kirk". My dad (James/Jim) liked the idea of a name that couldn't really be shorted, though I'm not sure how much he disliked "Jim". My name is dripping with religion, Kirk is "Church", Logan is after a theologian, Israel is like the country. Which tends to lead to erasure of my evangelical preacher's kid upbringing w/ people assuming I'm Jewish, but hey, I'm not THAT not-Jewish. (Also most Americans will spell Israel "Isreal" like they hear it pronounced.)

<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYWLKgKIAFw">John Henry</a> (Woody Guthrie) Americana

<blockquote class="quote">Most significantly, the National Climate Assessment--which is endorsed by nasa, noaa, the Department of Defense, and 10 other federal scientific agencies--contradicts nearly every position taken on the issue by President Donald Trump. Where the president has insisted that fighting global warming will harm the economy, the report responds: Climate change, if left unchecked, could eventually cost the economy hundreds of billions of dollars per year, and kill thousands of Americans to boot. Where the president has said that the climate will "probably" "change back," the report replies: Many consequences of climate change will last for millennia, and some (such as the extinction of plant and animal species) will be permanent.</blockquote>

Bell hooks' "Yearnings" broadened by mind on American racism, and with "My Favorite Shorts" I was glad to discover Spider Robinson.

<blockquote class="quote">There's two kingdoms. There's the earthly kingdom and the heavenly kingdom. In the heavenly kingdom the responsibility is to treat others as you'd like to be treated. In the earthly kingdom, the responsibility is to choose leaders who will do what's best for your country. Think about it. Why have Americans been able to do more to help people in need around the world than any other country in history? It's because of free enterprise, freedom, ingenuity, entrepreneurism and wealth. A poor person never gave anyone a job. A poor person never gave anybody charity, not of any real volume. It's just common sense to me.</blockquote>

so here's <a href="https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/look-heres-a-full-list-of-team-names-and-logos-from-the-alliance-of-american-football/">a link with all the new teams and logos</a>:

I was an officer with the CIA Clandestine Service and worked undercover on counterterrorism and intelligence all around the world for almost 10 years. The conversation that's going on in the United States right now about ISIS and about the United States overseas is more oversimplified than ever. Ask most Americans whether ISIS poses an existential threat to this country and they'll say yes. That's where the conversation stops. If you're walking down the street in Iraq or Syria and asked anybody why America dropped bombs, you get: "They were waging war on Islam." And you walk in America and you ask why were we attacked on 9/11, and you get: "They hate us because we're free." Those are stories, manufactured by a really small number of people on both sides who amass a great deal of power and wealth by convincing the rest of us to keep killing each other. I think the question we need to be asking, as Americans examining our foreign policy, is whether or not we're pouring kerosene on a candle. The only real way to disarm your enemy is to listen to them. If you hear them out, if you're brave enough to really listen to their story, you can see that more often than not, you might have made some of the same choices, if you'd lived their life instead of yours. <br>

The least any American can expect of a president is that in a crisis he will readily put the welfare of the nation he leads ahead of his own well-being. In other contexts, that is the ultimate test of character. It separates the military leader or executive who accepts blame for failure from the one who tries to shuffle it elsewhere.

<footer>Mark Edmudson in The Atlantic, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/walt-whitman-leaves-of-grass-american-democracy/586045/">Walt Whitman's Guide to a Thriving Democracy</a></footer></blockquote>

Also, I'm so suspect about psychological lab experiments built under assumptions of economist "rational actor" models. Much like casinos exploit artificially contrived exploits in probability that just didn't occur often to our ancestors, these experiments assume that real world people will take researchers at their word. Taking $50 now instead of $100 3 months from now may or may point a preference for immediate rewards - but also reflects an uncertain world where many, many intervening events can happen in 3 months, even if you basically trust the test operators. (This besides the sketchiness of using undergrads on hand at prestigious American Universities as stand-ins for citizens of anywhere in the damn world.)

Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom

Personally the american level-seeking characteristic I'm more concerned with these days is smarts; some Americans are so convinced of their own truthy gut intuition that they refuse to recognize that smarts and expertise actually exists; that some problems take a lot of study and though - sometimes pursuing their own specialized glossary or vocabulary so that to the outsider, it's almost impossible to tell if it's just some weird, out of touch intellectual circle jerk or more hard won esoteric knowledge. This point is why I was rather disdainful of that <a href="https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577">Intellectual Yet Idiot</a> post you linked to here.

<blockquote class='quote'>A common test I have for U.S. citizens is this: Do you know anybody who owns a pickup truck? It's the number-one-selling vehicle in the United States, and if you don't know people like that, you're out of touch with more than 50 percent of Americans.

More and more my other self feels less like an inner child and more like a loyal and clever but poorly trained dog... in particular a dog always on the lookout for snacks, at least when I'm in the kitchen at work... the emotional tricks this pup plays to get treats that the analytical brain knows I could easily do without. (heh, googling I find some signs of <a href="https://americanbuddhist.net/2014/05/03/do-we-have-an-inner-child-or-an-inner-dog/">therapy that looks to inner dogs instead of inner children</a> )<br>

<dd>“Americanah” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This was the one entry from a list of explicated sport metaphors where I wasn't sure I agreed - progress in American football is often made in great bounds, exciting, yard-consuming catches and runs - but the final result is then measured painstakingly, and the difference in success and failure can be a heartbreakingly small amount.

<blockquote class='quote'>For Wagner, as for most speakers of British English, a frown is an expression of displeasure that involves contracting the brow. But for me, and many speakers of American English, frowning involves turning down the corners of the mouth to indicate unhappiness, and more particularly sadness. That meaning is a 20th-century invention, and most American dictionaries have not yet noticed it. Some (mostly older) Americans still have the 'brow'-only meaning. But the new meaning is widespread, and more American than British, as our emoji names show. The ☹ is most commonly called sadface in British English, whereas it's frown or frowny face in many American contexts--including the standards document for Unicode, the international (but Americentric) body that approves new computer symbols.<br>

<blockquote class='quote'>A wise American reporter based in London once told me that every British news story is, deep down, about class. Every American story, he said, is about race.

<td>Pop from Germany... I think with authentic, personal footage from a USA roadtrip<br>I might be this band's biggest American fan, because of my deep adoration of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx-bPEPjR-M">As It Comes</a> (one of my top 3 ever songs).</td>

RIP Toni Morrison. I took all the African-American literature courses in college I could in order to double up on English and World Culture credits, and so got to enjoy a ton of great stuff. What a voice.

So the video was fun and ambitious, but overall the teams are a lot more generic and less focused on their hometowns than the short-lived <a href="https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/look-heres-a-full-list-of-team-names-and-logos-from-the-alliance-of-american-football/">Alliance of American Football</a>. (I snapshotted those <a href="https://kirk.is/2019/02/11">here in February</a>.)

One term the early part of the essay uses a lot is "contingent" - i.e. values that many Americans assume are universal and self-evident are actually dependent on quite a lot of factors of our history. (It was an awareness of a similar sense of "contingency" that fed into my loss of religious faith as a teen: the faith I had learned had declared itself to be universal and absolute - or worthless.)

Saw David Byrne's "American Utopia" the other night.... balcony seats at the Colonial - not good if you have vertigo!<br>

Though historians seldom allude to it, the American Dream is largely a European creation transported to American soil and frozen in time. [...] The American Dream emphasizes economic growth, personal wealth, and independence. The new European Dream focuses more on sustainable development, quality of life, and interdependence. The American Dream pays homage to the work ethic. The European Dream is more attuned to leisure and "deep play." The American Dream is inseparable from the country's religious heritage and deep spiritual faith. The European Dream is secular to the core. The American Dream depends on assimilation: We associate success with shedding our former ethnic ties and becoming free agents in the great American melting pot. The European Dream, by contrast, is based on preserving one's cultural identity and living in a multicultural world. The American Dream is wedded to love of country and patriotism. The European Dream is more cosmopolitan and less territorial.

The author doesn't claim that Europe is perfect, but its constitution and outlook, less unbridledly optimistic than the American and with a strong sense of interdependence, might be more attuned to the modern world where barriers to long distance communication and trade have dropped in so many ways. Also the author seems to be asserting a new bipolar USA vs. Europe outlook without consider how, say, China is doing, not to mention the rest of the world.

I'm trying to think through the downsides of the European Dream model. Both dreams are challenged by insular groups: fear of ethnic groups that decline to assimilate in the American model, or that won't recognize the supremacy of the secular in the public square in the European model.

I think there's also unease that a looser group will be at a disadvantage against larger, more ethnically or doctrinally cohesive rivals: China, Russia, or some kind of Islamic coalition if it ever got through (one way or, hopefully not, another) its internal splits. The American and European dreams have made room for a lot of technology-driven prosperity which has given those place hard to surmount leads, but to the extent the tech can be copied without the doctrine, the contests can become that much tighter.

Some interesting thoughts on <a href="https://www.sbnation.com/2019/9/26/20883568/american-sports-stadium-architecture-future">stadium design</a> - how it's about community and thoughtfulness...

<a href="https://youtu.be/DNwvfAr7W3Q">Blues Brothers' Peter Gunn Theme</a> - Such a thumping bassline. And I remember when Euclid High Stage Band rebranded itself 222nd Street Jazz, we looked to Belushi and Aykroyd's rip off of the African American bluesman as our sartorial guide.<br>

<a href="https://youtu.be/qayiQQOPRNE">The Dirty Dozen Brass Band's Inside Straight</a> - The New Orleans album was also one of the first 3 CDs I got. I brought it to Portugal, visiting the guy my mom and I hosted, and this album was an obscure bit of Americana there - their artsy director friend used this song for the opener for a fashion show / poetry reading they put together. Years later I'd be joining in with a rough version of this kind of music w/ various HONK bands...<br>

<blockquote class='quote'>I think the impact of superheroes on popular culture is both tremendously embarrassing and not a little worrying. While these characters were originally perfectly suited to stimulating the imaginations of their twelve or thirteen year-old audience, today's franchised übermenschen, aimed at a supposedly adult audience, seem to be serving some kind of different function, and fulfilling different needs. Primarily, mass-market superhero movies seem to be abetting an audience who do not wish to relinquish their grip on (a) their relatively reassuring childhoods, or (b) the relatively reassuring 20th century. The continuing popularity of these movies to me suggests some kind of deliberate, self-imposed state of emotional arrest, combined with an numbing condition of cultural stasis that can be witnessed in comics, movies, popular music and, indeed, right across the cultural spectrum. [...] I would also remark that save for a smattering of non-white characters (and non-white creators) these books and these iconic characters are still very much white supremacist dreams of the master race. In fact, I think that a good argument can be made for D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation as the first American superhero movie, and the point of origin for all those capes and masks.

<blockquote class='quote'>To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.

via Eun Kim's "The Ying and Yang of American Culture: A Paradox", a turn of the millennium view of the USA from a Korean lens. (Found in a used bookstore in Maine)

<br>We spent the afternoon at The National WWII Museum. Yeah, it's a bit too rah-rah, and distinctly the American story - though I give them some credit for confronting the racism and sexism of the time. (Like the Insectarium, they had a "4D movie" but this one was truly grand: physical props flying in, suds as artificial snow for the Battle of the Bulge, good use of light and sound and rumble effects.)

Stan Wolczyk was a platoon leader station on the American island of Attu off the coast of Alaska... I took this quote from a brief video "Comforting the Dead" at The National WWII Museum in New Orleans. (He then talks about bracing for his own death after growing cold after being wounded in combat, but he survived.) Also, he originally hailed from Cleveland!

The Republicans weren't exactly in a hurry for Nixon to fall, and only abandoned him when there was simply no way of refuting the evidence of obstruction of justice. I think it will be very similar this time around in that the big issue will be obstruction and the Republican party will stick with Trump until there is no way of being able to do that. If his approval rating stays in the 38-40% range, then they're not going to desert. They deserted Nixon when Nixon was in free fall. So let me make clear: this is not new territory for American politics. What should strike us is- its familiarity. And it wasn't just Nixon. With Reagan it was Iran-Contra, with Clinton we all know what the impeachment was about. This is how American politics is played, it's a contact sport.

My final book read of the '10s will likely be Eun Y. Kim's "The Yin and Yang of American Culture: A Paradox". I found a copy of this 2001 book in a used bookstore in Maine. I always appreciate cross-cultural views of the water in which I swim, and the two decade gap added an interesting twist - pre-WTC, pre-Social Media, pre-Obama and pre-Trump.

She also mentioned it was unusual for Asian middle class teens to have a job, except maybe in the family business. (She also doesn't think so highly of the American school system in general.)

<blockquote class='quote'>Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong observed that Americans regard all relationships as contracts.

<footer>Eun Y. Kim, "The Yin and Yang of American Culture"</footer>

I imagine the rise of social media since this book was written would amplify Kim's point. But I think it ties into the aforementioned egalitarianism: many Americans (especially folk from privileged groups) have the importance of their even casual musings promoted early on. When you combine that with emotional over-earnestness and the need to either persuade or amplify the feelings of group loyalty, you get a lot of sound.

Kim quotes the Dalai Lama - she went to a Christian high school and in general frets about the secularization of the American public square, and refers to Asian parents who would send their kids to Western religious schools even if they didn't want them to convert, figuring any religion was better than no religion.

<span class='star4'>The Yin and Yang of American Culture: A Paradox</span>

<blockquote class='quote'>With a certain linguistic register, it's very easy to hide yourself and just sort of repeat phrases that you've heard before. I still have that now when I talk to Americans: I'm always absolutely astonished at the breadth of their vocabulary; how wonderfully they actually manage to describe their own emotions, or express what they really want to say. East Germany, you wouldn't talk in a very open way about yourself, because opening up yourself was always also a dangerous thing. [...] I think in certain in societies, in socialist societies, you don't want to stress your individuality too much, I think. So when you start talking about yourself a little bit too much, I think that's always viewed as suspicious by the state. You don't want to be too individual; you don't want to reveal yourself as thinking too much about yourself or about your situation. But it's astonishing isn't it. If you don't have the word you actually can't understand yourself. You don't have the vocabulary that you don't understand your own feelings about a certain thing. It's astonishing isn't the whole language really sort of shapes the way you can think about a problem. I mean there are these these sort of Sapir-Whorf theories that have long been sort of criticized. They had this idea that your vocabulary allows you to sort of see the world in a certain way, which people don't agree with now. But I think there's still a way in which the way you think about yourself and about the world is shaped by the availability of words to describe it. Right? You can have a sort of an intuitive feeling, but I think unless you can actually describe it in words it's very very difficult.

J.) He behaves and has always behaved as an unabashed racist. Yes, I've seen your favorite meme that claims he was never accused of racism before the Democrats...Absolutely false. Donald Trump's long history of racism, from the 1970s to 2019 See the Central Park 5, the lawsuits and fines resulting from his refusal to lease to black tenants, the 1992 lost appeal trying to overturn penalties for removing black dealers from tables, his remarks to the house native American affairs subcommittee in 1993. The man sees and treats racial groups of people as monoliths.<br>

Thinking a little about taboos and sometimes violent reactions to protect that what's considered sacred - pictures of the prophet Mohammed for example, or the N-word from the mouth of anyone not African-American themselves. <br>

<a href="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/what-do-machine-learning-and-hunter-gatherer-children-have-in-common/">What Do Machine Learning and Hunter-Gatherer Children Have in Common?</a> - "They acquire knowledge in remarkably similar ways" - there's a takeaway for the West's kids too - provide high quality environments with lots of stuff and habits kids can use or emulate, from books to tools.

<td>Sweet little bit of patriotic a cappella... I was kind of happy such an early culturally important song was known for its performance by African-American artists... also love the "Rrrrrrrrrrr" sound effect.<br>Referenced at the WW2 Museum in NOLA.</td>

A Hidden Brain podcast on <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/03/02/811329597/the-cowboy-philosopher-a-tale-of-obsession-scams-and-family#:~:text=">"The Cowboy Philosopher" Riley Shepard</a> referenced a song "Atomic Power". There are two songs with similar names, similar brothers-named groups playing similar bluegrass styles, similar mixes of American patriotism about atomic weapons and apocalyptic thinking, similar amounts of present-day Google juice and increasing order of terribleness, about 6 years apart:

The whole assumption that Revelation is a guide to upcoming events... (and not predicting the fall of an empire 1500 years ago... look up <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preterism">Preterism</a> for an interesting take that that stuff happened) -- why try to make a sustainable planet at all? Plus you can always fit horrible current events into this kind of prophecy, so the end must be around the corner. It's the worst kind of semi-self-fulfilling prophecy possible, and an alarming number of American politicians in the highest offices have this mentality.

American Death toll for 9/11: 3,000<br>

American Death toll for COVID-19: 16,000 and counting

<a href="https://pleated-jeans.com/2020/04/13/are-american-movies-accurate/">Non-Americans Are Baffled By Some Of The Things Americans Do In Movies (30 Tweets)</a>Most of these were pretty much "yes" tho less so chips ON sandwiches

It would nice to think that the American sense of individualism (challenging sometimes for people who see the value of coming together and with a democratically elected government being a bulwark against corporate bullying) might help prevent the kind of overt fascism Baha describes. I wonder if it there are more insidious forms though. The overwhelming factor in American politics seems to be 2-party polarization and while it might not be the government per se shutting down/taking over groups, most every group has to display its left or right allegiance and set of assumptions. (Remember Republican "Never Trumpers"? They seem to have melted. And on the left, there are a lot of circular firing squads - the concern for the oppression of so many groups makes for a lot of litmus tests. It's not clear that such diversity of opinion under either the right or left ideological banner is tolerated. )

Making a Squirrel "American Ninja Warrior" course:

Y'know s'funny that for both "Gladiators" and "Ninja Warrior" the American version says "American". (Also almost surprised you can have "Ninja" in the title of "Ninja Warrior UK" given how they made Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles.)

I think any thoughtful read of the Bible would see this multifaceted nature (the Trinity being the most well-known aspect of that) - an old Testament God who walks the Earth, who can be bargained with, who is helpless to give his favored people victory because the other side has chariots with steel wheels, and then the transition to the New Testament, the different kind of story Jesus was preaching... not to mention the reckless "oh it's going to be bad but good in the end" nature of Revelation. But, one of the tenets of American Folk Christianity is that God is Eternal and Unchanging, and there's a dissonance there that I think most practitioners don't grapple with. (But, I shouldn't go so far as to say I know they haven't grappled with it, that's a bit presumptuous.)

<blockquote class='quote'>A reminder that the word "sex" was inserted into Title VII by a segregationist Democrat to try and kill the Civil Rights Act. One of the great self-owns of American legislative history.

(He goes on to write "I think I want to hear these missing notes about the border and the ground about us when I write and bring the full song to the attention of others." The Harper's Magazine review I got the quote from talks about how he was a tremendous force writing reports from the American Southwest and Mexico.)

<blockquote class='quote'>Humans just can't fathom a billion dollars. Casually we mix 'billion' and 'million' in the same sentence, but they're apples and Death Stars. And until we get our arms around that, some fundamental stuff about the American economy will elude us.

via this <a href="https://freakonomics.com/podcast/politics-industry/">Freakonomics podcast on the Great American Auopoly: Republicans and Democrats</a>. Like Coke and Pepsi, sometimes a good rival is the greatest frenemy you can have. I am sometimes astonished at people who demand strict readings of the Constitution - along with looking at the likely intents of the Founders - and sort of miss how much day to day political procedure is based on parties, which aren't mentioned in the Constitution and were widely viewed as extremely suspect back in the day.

<blockquote class='quote'>The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.

States get nuts. As happy as I am to live in a moderately liberal commonwealth (and just look at all these Republican governors in MA - we certainly have our own political divisions) I am an American before I am a Massachussetian. The USA is a unique political entity and while I might disagree with folks on the right on the balance of Personal Freedom vs Personal Justice (or rather, Freedom To vs Freedom From) these issues are about our nation, not a bunch of states where gerrymandered districts (and voting shenanigans that weirdly always lean red) keep pushing us to more fringe candidates, since the campaign threats only happen during primaries, not in general elections.

<td>The (Spike Jonze) video is kind of haunting juxtaposition with a middle class American suburb turning into a war zone.<br>The reprise of this <a href="https://kirk.is/2020/10/02/">REALLY hit me one morning</a> on the Jersey Shore.</td>

<a href="https://boingboing.net/2020/11/05/you-can-now-legally-compost-dead-bodies-in-washington-state.html">You can now legally compost dead bodies in Washington state</a> Love this idea. Americans are so uptight about how we deal with dearly departed - it's like we deny our mortality by preserving our old form as long as possible - and make our loved ones left behind vulnerable to all kinds of profiteers! There is beauty in being able to live on in the ecosphere in a purposeful way.

Whoa. I'm struck by how the Americans who might find this retelling the most blasphemous... kind of act like they agree with this Jesus' point?

<li class='plus'>took a lot of African American literature in college, the only overlap of "foreign culture" and my English major (After a Latina Authors class I found out I couldn't get English major credit for stuff I read in translation) It was generally great stuff but the choice was more pragmatic than enlightened.

<a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/american-crises-capitol-assault">The Five Crises of the American Regime</a>... <br>

The Republicans started the cycle of escalation in the 1990s. Rejecting the very idea of a bipartisan consensus, Newt Gingrich disseminated a partisan vocabulary to make it appear that Republicans favored the opposite of everything Democrats favored. Gingrich told Republicans to contrast the "conservative opportunity society" with "the liberal welfare state." Semantic warfare was combined with quasi-military organization, as Gingrich and his Republican successors imposed a degree of discipline on the Republican party in Congress that was alien to American traditions. The 1990s Republicans weaponized impeachment against Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. As Senate Majority leader, Mitch McConnell, occupying the same office as the great conciliator Lyndon Johnson, continued Newt Gingrich's tactics of treating the Democrats as enemies to be completely thwarted, not as partners in government.<br>

<span class='star4'>WBCN and The American Revolution</span>, <span class='star3'>Stop Making Sense</span></div>

<i>So... not too many movies in person in 2020 for obvious reasons. The background of "WBCN and The American Revolution" was cool to see at the Somerville Theater... (The concert film Stop Making Sense was pretty cool as well)</i>

<span class='star3'>Booksmart</span>, <span class='star3'>Fortune Feimster: Sweet & Salty</span>, <span class='star3'>Hustlers</span>, <span class='star3'>Brittany Runs a Martathon</span>, <span class='star4'>Parasite</span>, <span class='star2'>Logan Lucky</span>, <span class='star3'>End of Envagelion</span>, <span class='star3'>Homecoming</span>, <span class='star4'>End Times Fun</span>, <span class='star4'>Monty Python and the Holy Grail</span>, <span class='star3'>Astartes</span>, <span class='star3'>Event Horizon</span>, <span class='star4'>React for Beginners</span>, <span class='star4'>Maria Bamford: Weakness is the Brand</span>, <span class='star4'>The Shawshank Redemption</span>, <span class='star3'>Sincerely</span>, <span class='star3'>Boyz N The Hood</span>, <span class='star3'>Modern Times</span>, <span class='star3'>Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future</span>, <span class='star3'>Patton Oswald: I Love Everything</span>, <span class='star3'>Beyond</span>, <span class='star2'>UHF</span>, <span class='star3'>It Happened One Night</span>, <span class='star3'>Just Mercy</span>, <span class='star2'>Dave Attell : Captain Miserable</span>, <span class='star3'>Moonlight</span>, <span class='star4'>Eric Andre Legalize Everything</span>, <span class='star4'>O Brother, Where Art Thou?</span>, <span class='star4'>Knives Out</span>, <span class='star3'>Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga</span>, <span class='star3'>Jim Jeffries Intolerant</span>, <span class='star3'>School of Rock</span>, <span class='star4'>Dolemite is my Name</span>, <span class='star4'>Sam Jay: 3 in the Morning</span>, <span class='star3'>The Beastie Boys Story</span>, <span class='star3'>Shazam</span>, <span class='star3'>Rob Schneider: Asian Momma, Mexican Kids</span>, <span class='star4'>I'm Thinking of Ending Things</span>, <span class='star4'>The Science of Sleep</span>, <span class='star3'>What Happened Was</span>, <span class='star4'>Zach Galifianakis Live at the Purple Onion</span>, <span class='star2'>The Machinist</span>, <span class='star2'>Halloween</span>, <span class='star4'>On The Waterfront</span>, <span class='star3'>American History X</span>, <span class='star3'>Lewis Black: Thanks for Risking Your Life</span>, <span class='star3'>Borat Subsequent Moviefilm</span>, <span class='star3'>Sarah Cooper: Everything's Fine</span>, <span class='star3'>Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy</span>, <span class='star3'>The Oath</span>, <span class='star3'>Uncle Frank</span>, <span class='star3'>The Witches of Eastwick</span>, <span class='star3'>The Great Dictator</span></div>

Hey remember when Timothy McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma Federal building, killing 168 folks (including a bunch of kids) and injuring 680 others? That's the QAnon "Stop the Steal" vibe right there - the American militia movement.

<footer>from historian Timothy Snyder's excellent piece <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/magazine/trump-coup.html">The American Abyss</a> describing "gamers" vs "breakers" among the Republicans.</footer>

<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/03/hunt-gather-parent-timeless-advice-for-modern-parents/618172/">There's a Better Way to Parent: Less Yelling, Less Praise </a> Really interesting piece- objectively speaking, the current American always-praising, rebuild all family life around a kids PoV is rather unusual. <br>

Unpopular Opinion: I feel like Americans are using "whilst" way too much.

“In the Summer of 1986, photographer Sage Sohier set out to document the lives of gay Americans in their homes. It was the peak of AIDS hysteria, and her intimate photos stood (and continue to stand) in humanizing defiance to the horrible rumours and fears circulating about the gay community in mainstream society”

<blockquote class="tiktok-embed" cite="https://www.tiktok.com/@theovtnetwork/video/6947693439454661894" data-video-id="6947693439454661894" style="max-width: 605px;min-width: 325px;" > <section> <a target="_blank" title="@theovtnetwork" href="https://www.tiktok.com/@theovtnetwork">@theovtnetwork</a> <p>The <a title="explanation" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/explanation">#explanation</a> of <a title="pollenseason" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/pollenseason">#PollenSeason</a>. <a title="pollen" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/pollen">#pollen</a> <a title="pollenallergy" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/pollenallergy">#pollenallergy</a> <a title="americanhistory" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/americanhistory">#americanhistory</a> <a title="edutokers" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/edutokers">#edutokers</a> <a title="edutok" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/edutok">#edutok</a> <a title="blacktiktokcommunity" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/blacktiktokcommunity">#blacktiktokcommunity</a> <a title="blacktiktoks" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/blacktiktoks">#blacktiktoks</a> <a title="blacktikok" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/blacktikok">#blacktikok</a> <a title="blm" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/blm">#blm</a></p> <a target="_blank" title="♬ original sound - J.C." href="https://www.tiktok.com/music/original-sound-6947693340397669125">♬ original sound - J.C.</a> </section> </blockquote> <script async src="https://www.tiktok.com/embed.js"></script>

Very thoughtful piece on <a href="https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/05/rapture-fear-evangelical-americans-church-miller.html">Evangelicals and how expectations of the Rapture looms so large for them</a>.<br>

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.<br>

<blockquote class='quote'>Surges in Americans' preferred drugs of choice seem to always align with what is available in the region our nation is invading.

<footer>Holliwell (American), main character in Robert Stone's "A Flag for Sunrise"</footer>

(He's drunk delivering a speech to a hostile university audience in a fictional Central American nation but then admits there really isn't such a saying. But there should be!)

Progressives can often get jealous of other countries - stuff like universal health care, sane gun laws, etc. But here's a fun list of <a href="https://pleated-jeans.com/2021/06/04/random-things-americans-didnt-know-the-rest-of-the-world-was-jealous-of/">25 Random Things Americans Didn't Know The Rest Of The World Was Jealous Of</a>...

<blockquote class='quote'>Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like "socialism" and "capitalism." Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the "free" world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?

You see how oppressed Americans are by the drab bland colors of our cars and houses.

I was yesterday years old when I realized that those "thin blue line" defacements of the American flag are very literally the banner of the police state. Like it couldn't be more on the nose than that.<br>

You know, between this particular factoid and then Southern states helping the USA lead the world in new COVID cases despite our unprecedented access to vaccines - it's hard to have a lot of American pride and not think we're a nation of dumbkofs.

<a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/07/american-anger-polarization-fox-news/">Mother Jones on FOX news</a> as the biggest provider of fuel for the hyperpartisan flames. (Combine that with nuts-o gerrymandering and an overflowing abundance of safe districts where the political threat is ALWAYS from being called out as too soft from inside your own party vs actually having to appeal to media voters... it's trouble.)

(And yeah, on one level maybe it should seem blasphemous to, say, ask God to grant victory in a sporting event (some believers will just ask for a fair game without injuries) but I'm also mature enough to understand that this kind of down-to-earthness and personal aspect is important in American Folk Christianity, and part of how a lot of people live their connection to their God. It's social and psychological as much as it is theological and supernatural.)

<td>Kind of lovely break up song from a pretty obscure but great European group.<br>Final song I didn't already have from their new album... been their biggest American fan since I heard their transcendent <a href="https://vimeo.com/219397360">As It Comes</a> at the end of their indie horror film "Welk"</td>

So the NY Times article says <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/07/briefing/risk-breakthrough-infections-delta.html">How small are the chances of the average vaccinated American contracting Covid? Probably about one in 5,000 per day, and even lower for people who take precautions or live in a highly vaccinated community.</a><br>

<footer>Ken Eglin, via a <a href="https://www.thisamericanlife.org/746/this-is-just-some-songs">This American Life episode</a> with a segment on Englin and "Duplex Planet"</footer>

Like white folks became so dependant on the hundreds of years of labor that Native Americans put into domesticating these crops and now they're so removed culturally from their origins that they've become inherant parts of white culture.<br>

<td>South/Central American club music.<br>Played by DJ at a friends retirement shindig. </td>

So we have a mix of people who maybe just had music-as-an-elective in high school and college and are getting back to it, or even some people who just started with ear training School of Honk, against, like, lapsed escapees from Berklee. We draw music influence and sometimes charts from lots of places (probably especially other HONK bands...) in the NOLA street tradition and trad jazz and maybe a little klezmer and African and Central/South American and Caribbean - like in a way it reflects a beautiful patchwork society. I mean not as much as we'd like at times- achieving diversity and looking like the less-gentrified parts of neighborhoods we're in is a challenge. Like if you're trying to frame most music as being of a culture, our is more loosely knit than many other traditions that come from a specific community - like, progressive liberals, often white, who live in small atomic families, often are living far from where they grew up, and who dig on bringing in lots of musical influences to their playing.

I do understand that this doesn't have to be the basis of Christian faith - here's a <a href="https://baptistnews.com/article/mostamericansbelieveinmultiplepathstosalvationsurveyreveals/#.YVxCM0bMLlw">Baptist News</a> piece from 2009 about surveys saying 40-60% of Americans say differing religions can lead to eternal life. (Heh, not even going to get into the eternal life bit.) <br>

A page for the hymnal for The Church of Gun, where every American student gets to be part of the worship whether they believe or not. From today's shooting in Arlington, TX.<br>

Vaccine mandates: as American as <a href="https://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/GW&smallpoxinoculation.html">George Washington and the Continental Army</a>...

<td>Thoughtful kinda country tune, "Sometimes Father, You and I, are like a 3-legged horse that can't get across the finish line..."<br>From the Native American produce film "Smoke Signals"</td>

<footer>Gene Simmons of KISS, after <a href="https://americansongwriter.com/after-contracting-covid-gene-simmons-speaks-out-i-dont-care-about-your-political-beliefs/">contracting breakthrough COVID</a></footer>

This afternoon's Radio 4 quiz show included the line "One in three Americans weighs as much as the other two."

thoughtful piece on <a href="https://slate.com/business/2021/12/mall-death-sad-uncanny.html">the death of the American Mall</a> and how "A lot of the stores that once populated malls have been decimated by predatory hedge funds."</footer>

There is a clear and present danger that American democracy will not withstand the destructive forces that are now converging upon it. Our two-party system has only one party left that is willing to lose an election. The other is willing to win at the cost of breaking things that a democracy cannot live without.

("Jung and Restless" via "The Big Book of American Humor" - I can't believe what an influential tome that was for me.)

<td>Funky cover of the Beatles song. I got sort of obsessed of if I like the way they tweak the "you can be my driver, and that's a start"...<br>Spin off of looking for Aretha Franlin's cover of "Let It Be" when I found this album of Black American Beatles covers.</td>

Also, we'll be listening to Act One, "Ghostwriter", in <a href="https://www.thisamericanlife.org/757/the-ghost-in-the-machine">The Ghost in the Machine episode</a> of This American Life, where a woman uses GPT-3 to work through her grief about the loss of her sister back in college. <br>

<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/19/politics/willie-oree-congressional-gold-medal-house-nhl/index.html">House passes bill to award Congressional Gold Medal to Willie O'Ree, the first Black NHL player</a> Just found out about Willie O'Ree, first Black player in the NHL. Glad to hear he was a Bruin! Celtics were the first NBA team to draft an African American too. (Unlike the Red Sox who were notably last to integrate) <br>

<a href="https://fullstackeconomics.com/18-charts-that-explain-the-american-economy/">18 Charts that Explain the American Economy</a>...

<td>Female pop.<br>I think some incidental music on "This American Life"</td>

<td>In the spirit of "Everyone's Free (To Where Sunscreen)", sardonic advice with a beat.<br>Something from "This American Life".</td>

<a href="https://www.cracked.com/image-pictofact-8177-17-biblical-things-that-are-nowhere-in-the-bible">17 Biblical Things (That Are Nowhere In The Bible)</a> - I think some of these are debatable but I'm often struck by how abibilical a lot of American Folk Christianity is... like getting winged off to the Pearly Gates for judgement overseen by St Peter right at death isn't really in the book...

I used to believe that the human race as a whole was basically a few steps above wolves. That given the slightest change in circumstances, we would all, sooner or later, tear each other to shreds. That we were, at root, self-interested, cowardly, envious and potentially dangerous in groups. I have since come to believe -- after many meals with many different people in many, many different places -- that though there is no shortage of people who would do us harm, we are essentially good. That the world is, in fact, filled with mostly good and decent people who are simply doing the best they can. Everybody, it turns out, is proud of their food (when they have it). They enjoy sharing it with others (if they can). They love their children. They like a good joke. Sitting at the table has allowed me a privileged perspective and access that others, looking principally for "the story," do not, I believe, always get. People feel free, with a goofy American guy who has expressed interest only in their food and what they do for fun, to tell stories about themselves -- to let their guard down, to be and to reveal, on occasion, their truest selves. ... People, wherever they live, are not statistics. They are not abstractions. ... I'm not saying that sitting down with people and sharing a plate is the answer to world peace. Not by a long shot. But it can't hurt.

Potential alternate States of the USA are so rich for alternate world thinking... (Also mentioned Sequoyah, a state based on the communities of Native Americans...)

This passage is a lot of what I was trying to capture in my comic <a href="https://kirk.is/features/ofthemoments/">Of The Moments</a>. (Also the ending passage of <a href="http://www.whysanity.net/monos/ab3.html">American Beauty</a>. <br>

<td>Sad modern pop, a bit like The National <br><a href="https://www.thisamericanlife.org/765/off-course">via This American Life</a></td>

Jim believed that God sort of generally watched over the world but didn't try to oversee every single detail. He said that, for example, when you're born, you could be American or Chinese or Russian or African, depending. In heaven are millions of souls lined up waiting to be born, and when it's your turn, you go down the chute like a gumball to whoever put the penny in the slot. You were born to your parents because, right at that moment when they Did It, you were next in line. Two seconds later and you could have been [someone completely different].

People who think the US health care system is the envy of the world are <a href="https://bogleech.tumblr.com/post/686867145392537600/infectedwithnyanites-americans-are-kept?fbclid=IwAR02VX90Z3rlLPENiH00YUcwl4n2gL8orvvTO_yP2fQFA65MfOj0KOtl23o">very badly informed</a>. (Maybe it's the best if you're a gazillionaire? Like it's optimized for the top 5% of expensive shit, but for the other 95 meat and potatoes stuff it's just out there.)

If you're trying to be cosmopolitan it's easy to look down on American food in general, but there are <a href="https://pleated-jeans.com/2022/06/20/non-americans-what-is-the-best-american-food/">some things we do really well</a>....

With the SCOTUS out to break down walls of church and state for school purposes, people who lean secular may find this article <a href="https://www.cracked.com/article_34058_modern-american-satanism-the-church-of-satan-vs-the-satanic-temple.html">Modern American Satanism: The Church of Satan Vs. The Satanic Temple</a>of interest. <br>

Being an American used to mean something about freedom? now it's state by state. unless you like guns, that's everywhere.

<li>GPT-3 etc text generation. The "Ghostwriter" segment of <a href="https://www.thisamericanlife.org/757/the-ghost-in-the-machine">The Ghost in the Machine</a> episode of This American Life just blew me away... and you can find instances of it online. The ability to generate text that seems to have a point of view.

Good <a href="https://popula.com/2019/02/24/about-face/">webcomic about the black trucks, punisher logos, and disgraced American flags</a>.

Too I've been meaning to post <a href="https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/285-american-division">the podcast where Sam Harris talks with David French</a> - they come from very different places culturally but make a very good dialog. In particular I was struck by the talk of the Southern "Honor Culture".

I like that the first American coin said "MIND YOUR BUSINESS"

'Americans are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.'

Ok, it's bad enough that such an important piece of American Revolutionary history is a gas station, but a frickin' BP - BRITISH PETROLEUM? There's some frickin' irony.

"American Flags to Half-Staff Honoring the Death of Queen Elizabeth II Until Sunset on the Day of Interment (currently unknown)" <br>

"Americans have long been taught to hate all people who will not or cannot work, to hate even themselves for that. We can thank the vanished frontier for that piece of common-sense cruelty. The time is coming, if it isn't here now, when it will no longer be common sense. It will simply be cruel."

Reminds me of the mistakes we may be making in psychology/cognitive science assuming everyone is wired like undergrads at expensive American colleges who are still willing to sit through stuff for $50...

"I've never seen such a thing before," she said to me. "War must be a very sexy thing to Americans."

The <a href="https://www.articlesofinterest.co/podcast">Articles of Interest podcast</a> is running a series "American Ivy" - the first episode was about the 1965 Japanese book <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_Ivy">Take Ivy</a>, that kind of cemented the preppie/ivy look. <br>

I suppose that's really what so many American women are complaining about these days: They find their lives short on story and overburdened with epilogue.

woke is "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them."

The dark flipside to the MLKjr holiday, the obverse of amplifying the positive message aspect of equality and justice, is the reminder for the potential for horrible violence in American society, amplified by the nearly unfettered availability of guns.

But then, for about the thousandth time, my mind wanders over the past ten years. Republicans got the tax cuts they wanted. They got the financial deregulation they wanted. They got the wars they wanted. They got the unfunded spending increases they wanted. And the results were completely, unrelentingly disastrous. A decade of sluggish growth and near-zero wage increases. A massive housing bubble. Trillions of dollars in war spending and thousands of American lives lost. A financial collapse. A soaring long-term deficit. Sky-high unemployment. All on their watch and all due to policies they eagerly supported. And worse: ever since the predictable results of their recklessness came crashing down, they've rabidly and nearly unanimously opposed every single attempt to dig ourselves out of the hole they created for us. <br>

The Gods of Shuffle graced me with The Mountain Goats' <a href="https://youtu.be/QS27S3mspjU">No Children</a>, I found <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/10/10/653349496/the-mountain-goats-american-anthem-no-children-dysfunction">this interview</a> with these two quotes I'm finding kind of moving at the moment...

ODDLY ENOUGH, 40 Years Ago Today, exactly, word was published of me getting a "superspeller" award, some fundraiser for the American Lung Association. Which seems weird to me because spelling really has not felt like a strong suit for me for some time.

My second point, in fact, was something the convicts had taught me. They all believed that the White people who insisted that it was their Constitutional right to keep military weapons in their homes all looked forward to the day when they could shoot Americans who didn't have what they had, who didn't look like their friends and relatives, in a sort of open-air shooting gallery we used to call in Vietnam a "Free Fire Zone." You could shoot anything that moved, for the good of the greater society, which was always someplace far away, like Paradise.

anyways (I say this as someone who is deeply critical of the united states government, military, unchecked capitalism, police, etc) I am SICK of people treating america as if it has no cultural value or positives so..... I love u 85 million acres (bigger than italy) of national parks. I love u harlem renaissance. I love u groundhogs day. I love u sweet tea and fried chicken and jambalaya. I love u apple cider donuts and maizes on crisp autumn days. I love u 95k miles of coastlines and new england fisherman and hand knitted sweaters. I love u halloween where millions of people dress up and give candy to strangers and carve jack o'lanterns. I love u small talk and small towns and potlucks and bringing over casseroles to your struggling neighbors. I love u cowboys and ranch hands and arizonian cactus. I love u appalachian trail and dirtbikes and divebars. I love u sparklers and fireflies. I love u mark twain and toni morrison and emily dickinson and henry david thoreau. I love u rock n roll i love u bluegrass and hippies i love u jimi hendrix and nirvana and CCR and janis joplin. I love u victorian houses and jonny appleseed and john henry and mothman and bigfoot. I love u foggy days in the pacific northwest and neon signs and roadside attractions. I love u baseball and 1950s diners and soft serve. I love u native american art and pop art and poptarts. I love u blue jeans and barbecues and jazz musicians

The headline for this is interesting in what it leaves out, because the article is all in the context at a giant convention for car dealers. It's one of the more popular ways of making a lot of money, but it's a middleman role, and dependent on the regulations that prevent car makers from selling direct (with Tesla being one of the foremost challengers to those rules - as well as being the harbinger of a probably pivot to EV, where it's not clear that the pickings will be quite so ripe for the dealers who make so much bank on providing warranty service.) But dealers also have a strong reputation for backing local charities and sports leagues and what not - kind of a well-distributed resting point from the American tendency to always channel wealth upwards.

I do love the American Traditional tattoo style and this video had a lot of fun with it.

The African-American jazz pianist Fats Waller had a sentence he used to shout when his playing was absolutely brilliant and hilarious. This was it: "Somebody shoot me while I'm happy!"

I say in lectures in 1996 that fifty percent or more of American marriages go bust because most of us no longer have extended families. When you marry somebody now, all you get is one person.

~2021: Jan 6 - attempted coup by fashy Americans

It's an antidote to the kind of leftist/central view of "things are getting better and better, poverty is decreasing" etc , at least in terms of the American condition. Not that I'm that much of an American First-er either. But the idea of how we were founded as a plantation economy, and then later we got a giant post-war boost, having been shielded from the downsides of war by big oceans and friendly neighbors, but now it's just a slow grind back... oy.

From this summary of why <a href="https://www.tumblr.com/derinthescarletpescatarian/729697553866719233/the-weirdness-of-american-narratives-regarding?source=share">chattel slavery</a> (as seen in the triangle trade) was uniquely bad in history - sometimes conservatives will try to defend the USA by saying "hey, there's been a lot of slavery historically" but honestly it interfaced with capitalism to make new unprecedented scale of cruelty. Much like we view the holocaust as uniquely awful without giving a pass to other genocides.

<i>I finally got to rewatching "American Beauty" - obviously a problematic movie in a few ways, but also interesting to see in going through middle aged struggles in American suburbia. Anyway this lovely, richly orchestrated cover was in it.</i>

Actually that last note makes me wonder as well. I think American Folk Christianity used to be more in tune with the older idea of a bodily resurrection (I think most canonically at the end of the world, after a period somewhat akin to dreamless sleep.) But I feel like a kind of cartesian dualism has strongly returned, the more common view is potentially disembodied souls flitting around, making the body almost coincidental. I mean, cynically, that's a pragmatically utilitarian and soothing explanation for why cremation and other forms of corpse destruction aren't a barrier for eternal life.

I really need to do more studying and write an essay on how Americanism is a genuine folk religion which reveres capital and the vague concept of "the free market" as a god of providence to be pleased in order to lead a prosperous life, also that the founding fathers are prophetic, perhaps even messianic figures who basically gave birth to this god through the revolutionary war, and that the vast majority of conservative Christians in America revere capital more than the god they claim to serve in an ironic sort of golden calf situation.

<i>"Germans pretending to be American Cowboys" remains one of my favorite subgenres of music...</i>

There is so much that protestant American Folk Christianity leaves behind when it tries to strip away the trappings and get back to basics. (Actually maybe some of the snake handler / speaking in tongues Pentecostals get back to those earlier, more ecstatic forms of religion?) They even gloss over things in their own Bible - who is the rest of "Us" in "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness"? Is Sophia/Wisdom of the second half of Proverbs 8 just a poetic conceit, or is there something weird and older and more beautiful going on there? Explaining away those bits is kind of weird for a faith that claims to look to only its scriptures as God's protected final word for so much.

<span class='star4'>Swiss Army Man</span>, <span class='star3'>Glass Onion</span>, <span class='star2'>Jackass Forever</span>, <span class='star3'>Baby J</span>, <span class='star2'>Bio-Dome</span>, <span class='star3'>Dazed & Confused</span>, <span class='star3'>The Fault in Our Stars</span>, <span class='star2'>Cocktail</span>, <span class='star2'>Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness</span>, <span class='star3'>Clue</span>, <span class='star4'>American Beauty</span>, <span class='star3'>Annihilation</span>, <span class='star3'>Police Academy</span>, <span class='star5'>Backbeat</span>, <span class='star4'>The Naked Gun</span>, <span class='star3'>Across the Spider-Verse</span>, <span class='star3'>Interstella 5555</span>, <span class='star3'>Paul Blart: Mall Cop</span>, <span class='star3'>The Mummy</span>, <span class='star4'>The Princess Bride</span>, <span class='star3'>Assembled: Making of Loki (1+2)</span>, <span class='star3'>The Nice Guys</span>, <span class='star4'>Pete Holmes: I Am Not for Everyone</span>, <span class='star3'>Marriage Story</span>, <span class='star4'>It's a Wonderful Life</span>, <span class='star2'>12:01</span>, <span class='star3'>Monty Pythons's The Life of Brian</span>, <span class='star4'>The Secret Life of Brian</span></div>

I just mean that the world has begun to freak out a lot of ignorant people, and America has more ignorant people than any other industrial nation, because of certain differences between European and American capitalists.

In general, European capitalists usually have broad educations, keep up with artistic and cultural trends, have long accepted some degree of socialism as inevitable, and believe they can make bigger profits with very well educated workers who understand the science behind the technology they use. American capitalists usually have narrowly specialized educations, no interests beyond profit itself, fear that any degree of socialism will destroy them utterly, and believe they can make bigger profits with an ignorant and docile working class.

<a href="https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-life-and-death-of-the-suburban-american-mall?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us">The Life and Death of the Suburban American Mall</a>. All these malls being just gone is kind of a gut punch, right there for me with Geauga Lake park being wiped out and the old Salvation Army building in Salamanca NY - first home I remember - being a (weirdly small) flat lot. <br>

<ul class="RihjV"><li class="k31gt">When in doubt review your statement of intent</li><li class="k31gt">You want to be daring and new but never be ashamed if you find a place within a Tradition or the Tradition</li><li class="k31gt">Any instrument can be a folk music instrument if it's played by the folks, and we all are just folks</li><li class="k31gt">If you deal honestly with complex subjects, no one will be able to tell that your work is minimalist</li><li class="k31gt">Dress like you want to sound.</li><li class="k31gt">The foundation of American music is Jazz, and the foundation of Jazz is collaboration. Play with others when you can to enrich yourself and to enrich others.</li><li class="k31gt">The soul sounds of Curtis Mayfield and Isaac Hayes, the psychadelia of Charalambides and Lau Nau, the American Pop of Paul Simon and Violent Femmes. It's all folk music</li><li class="k31gt">Reject the worldly idea of becoming a great musician... JUST LIVE MUSIC! (this one is borrowed directly from Mononeon. Take it. Live it. Make it a part of you and never forget or deny where that part of you came from. That's what being in the tradition is)</li><li class="k31gt">Face what it is you do before you ask others to face it.</li><li class="k31gt">Make your voice heard. Make other voices heard. Sing it like you mean it.</li></ul>

MAGA folks replacing American Flag lapel pins with AR-15 pins seems to reinforce this interpretation....

<a href="https://www.tumblr.com/derinthescarletpescatarian/744523541544927233?source=share">American Ice Football</a> - a German invention playing the game of USA football but on a hockey rink - but no skates.

Erika, who co-leads a "Science and Spirituality" group with me, recommended the <a href="https://www.thisamericanlife.org/304/heretics">This American Life podcast episode on Carlton Pearson</a>, an evangelical superstar (And Oral Robert's philosophical heir apparent) who had his church dissolved from beneath him when he pivoted to "The Gospel of Inclusion", rejecting the idea that hell was the future for everyone who didn't fly right in the Evangelical Christian sense.

Still, the way Pearson lost his church and was scorned and branded a heretic? I guess those people rejecting him feel that he's doing no one any favors my threatening their immortal souls (though honestly the Biblical support for American Folk Christianity's vision of hell isn't all that strong) - but you get the sense that those people are absolutely threatened by the concept of there not being this supra-existential threat to justify all of this noise.

As an agnostic, I have spent most of my life thinking about the decline of faith in America in mostly positive terms. Organized religion seemed, to me, beset by scandal and entangled in noxious politics. So, I thought, what is there really to mourn? Only in the past few years have I come around to a different view. Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence.

Thinking of the <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/midlife-misery-is-there-happiness-after-the-40s/">U shaped curve</a> where middle age tends to be kind of a low point. 40 for women, 50 for men.

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