Parts of American culture that have never really been imported outside the US

Sorry, I meant "exported".

Sport

Redneck comedians.

Rong:

http://www.leftlion.co.uk/images/articles/jethro.jpg

waffle house

Anyone who answers this thread should probably have their explanations at the ready. xposts

Hooters

xpost

Not true; people in Helsinki live to say "GIT 'ER DONE!"

What do you mean by sport? Okay, maybe American football isn't that popular outside USA, but even a place like Finland has an American football league, as small as it may be.

(several x-posts)

Dude with the beer is Jethro, he's the Britishes version of a redneck comedian.

I agree with Gooblar, maybe instead of just listing things you might want to speculate why this or that particular piece of culture never made the trip.

Tipping!

(sorry)

Fizzy beer that doesn't taste of anything?

AUS

Tuomas is right about American football, I believe Darryl Glockenlocker III had a very successful season as starting Stanton for the Turku Kaffirbashers in the early 90s.

I guess the explanation for tipping is easy: in Europe at least waiters make enough money for living without needing the tips.

Fizzy beer that doesn't taste of anything?

-- snoball, Sunday, 25 May 2008 22:47 (21 seconds ago) Link

no, I had something like that in the uk somewhere. couldn't tell ya what it was.

Or at least that's the impression I've gotten from the various ILE tipping threads: that Americans feel obliged to tip because the waiters wouldn't otherwise make a living on their minimum wage.

(x-post)

Tap water xpost

Tell us more, Tuomas.

The tipping thing was joek pls dont start thread # 2938750394869068 on it ;_;

You can get lots of tasteless beer in Finland too, though it isn't American brands rather than local ones. But I don't think they're very far away from American beer.

prod

In Communist Europe all waiters are given company limousines and paid in Krugerrands.

Dave Matthews Band?

Shooting a couple of dozen of your school chums has never really crossed over to this side of the pond.

wikipedia:

The Fountainhead eventually became a worldwide success
...
Atlas Shrugged ... went on to become an international bestseller

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/worldwide/story/0,9959,615157,00.html

Next!

gun shows

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1a/Houston_Gun_Show_at_the_George_R._Brown_Convention_Center.jpg/800px-Houston_Gun_Show_at_the_George_R._Brown_Convention_Center.jpg
http://www.novatownhall.com/blog/graphics/gun_show_chantilly_lg.jpg
http://whtm.acc-tv.com/images/whtm/news/vidcap_billboard0423.jpg

What do you mean by sport? Okay, maybe American football isn't that popular outside USA, but even a place like Finland has an American football league, as small as it may be.

Your original post said that Ayn Rand hadn't "made a big impact outside the US", not that she was completely unknown outside of the USA. I'm not denying that American Football might have a fringe following in other countries, but compared to the spread of rock 'n' roll, coke 'n' pepsi, jeans, etc. you can't really say it's taken the world by storm.

What does "international bestseller" mean? Because I've studied philosophy and the social sciences, and I've never heard any mention of Ayn Rand from others than Americans.

(x-post)

Okay, fair enough.

Shooting a couple of dozen of your school chums has never really crossed over to this side of the pond.

Except that someone in Finland did just that last autumn. I'm hoping it was a singular case and not the beginning of a trend.

my impression of ayn rand is that she made kind of a splash internationally at the time, but only in the u.s. did she really inspire several generations of libertarian asshattery.

leaf peeping?

What does "international bestseller" mean? Because I've studied philosophy and the social sciences, and I've never heard any mention of Ayn Rand from others than Americans.

maybe it's because she's not a philosopher, just a shitty semi-contemporary novelist, and English is not the native language of your country

I think libertarinism in general is quite unpopular in Europe at least.

(xx-post)

also as should be obvious, that list of 'most popular books in america' consists primarily of books that for one reason or another have reached a wide audience of relatively youthful readers and/or have a lot of fanboys/girls

Ayn Rand has exported outside of US Borders as far as Canada. See: The lyrics of Rush.

Do other countries have the same insanely poorly planned suburbs the US does where there are no sidewalks and you have to drive 10 miles to get to the nearest grocery store?

maybe it's because she's not a philosopher, just a shitty semi-contemporary novelist, and English is not the native language of your country

Yeah, but in America she seems to have lots of followers who dig her because of her philosophical ideas and not her literary value. And lots of other American novels and philosophy have been translated to Finnish (as well as other European languages, of course) and have had a big impact here.

http://www.coastaltown.nildram.co.uk/jim/gun_show_chantilly_lgw.jpg

Do other countries have the same insanely poorly planned suburbs the US does where there are no sidewalks and you have to drive 10 miles to get to the nearest grocery store?

No sidewalks? Where are you supposed to walk?

Yeah, but in America she seems to have lots of followers who dig her because of her philosophical ideas and not her literary value.

if you did a poll in America checking her name recognition, you'd probably get less than 35%. the number of people who are really into her 'philosophy' is dwarfed by the number of people who like her books as 'literature' or simply because it makes them feel good about being narcissistic.

You can't. When I was a kid I would have to walk over people's front lawns to get to the nearest store as cars honked at me and swerved out of the way. This helps explain the obesity problem.

Seriously?! That sounds absurd.

if you did a poll in America checking her name recognition, you'd probably get less than 35%. the number of people who are really into her 'philosophy' is dwarfed by the number of people who like her books as 'literature' or simply because it makes them feel good about being narcissistic.

Okay, whatever, my point was that she seems to be an influential writer (whether as an novelist or as a philosopher) in the US (and maybe other English-speaking countries) who is virtually unknown in Continental Europe.

americans think sidewalks are for scary people who can't even afford to ride the bus. there was some suburb (in virginia, i think) that passed an ordinance a few years ago requiring sidewalks be installed in all these subdivisions that didn't have them (because kids were getting hit by cars or something), and the people in the subdivisions flipped the fuck out at the thought of strangers being able to walk past their homes. (then they probably all went to the next gun show to stock up.)

gun shows

deep fried twinkies

^^^ not sure that's even out of MN yet, to be honest

xpost:

i mean, seriously, for your average suburban american, the idea of having to walk anywhere is threatening and bizarre. that's why half of suburbia is parking lots.

http://www.egge.net/~savory/friedmars.jpg

decent mexican food

jokes about canada

ignoring soccer

creationist theme parks

"tossing the pigskin"

men's league softball

Seems like the suburbian American idea of public and private space is very different from the European one. No wonder suburban kids in the US hang out in malls, if they don't even have sidewalks to loiter on.

There aren't that many real suburbs in the US ... people just call anything that's not a city "the suburbs". I grew up in the suburbs of NYC and there are sidewalks, trains, buses, etc.

Most places with no sidewalks, etc., are exurban or rural kinda places, and it's not too surprising that they aren't all that well developed.

keg parties in cornfields/gravel pits (<---- I just sort of assumed that Euros don't have kegs party and that everyone else is too poor or something)

Okay, whatever, my point was that she seems to be an influential writer (whether as an novelist or as a philosopher) in the US (and maybe other English-speaking countries) who is virtually unknown in Continental Europe.

but you're just wrong. yes, she has influenced a small number of people who happen to have been important in government, on the right-wing side, but she is a very very tiny element in american culture writ large.

My mom's never really made much of an impact outside of the U.S.

i mean, seriously, for your average suburban american, the idea of having to walk anywhere is threatening and bizarre.

I realise this is a little hyperbolic but it is pretty freaking sad, as well. Aussies are as lazy as the next bastard and we have some car congestion probs too, but there's as big a movement of ppl getting about on foot, bikes, trams, etc.

The idea that public transport and walking is strictly for poor/scary/homeless people is just... I don't know what to say.

clear pie

freedom

grits

true grit

the balls to stand up to a dictator

Hershey's chocolate

What the hell are grits, anyway? There are aspects of American culture that have never been imported to other parts of AMerica

corn mazes

xp that was not an answer to your question

corncob gruel

that was an answer to yr question

minor league baseball

aspen, co

indian reservations

funnel cake

there are many suburban/exurban areas in which you'd have to walk for miles to get to any commercial establishment. people who live in these areas don't think that 'walking is just for poor/homeless people', as there are no poor/homeless people in these areas. however, walking in these areas could be scary in such areas even to a total urbanite, because there are no other people around except for people who are driving by in cars.

civilian militias (<---this exception i guess is limited to the "first world")

I grew up in the suburbs of NYCboston and there are sidewalks, trains, buses, etc.

honkytonks

the dave matthews band

decent mexican food

-- gbx, Sunday, May 25, 2008 6:13 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

The question that logically follows is WHY?

a good thread would be: parts of american culture we would like to apologize for loosing on the rest of the world

1 jam bands

sorta sick of doing all the heavy lifting around here, guys

xp are you british?

I grew up in the suburbs of NYCboston and there are sidewalks, trains, buses, etc.

these are more urban "inner-ring suburbs"

Am I british, or do you mean jho? (gbx)

things that some americans are sometimes inclined to think are exclusively---and embarrassingly---american but actually aren't:

* being crazy about guns
* tractor pulls
* ridiculous affection for motorsports
* hunting shit
* bad manners abroad
* willful ignorance of and a simmering disdain for foreign cultures coupled, paradoxically, with an generosity towards visiting strangers

xp you, rabies. jho i already know everything about

EVERYTHING

i think i was mostly thinking about england and germany in that last one

O M G

!

Do they have the internet outside of the U.S. yet?

http://www.sacredsites.com/asia/nepal/images/swayambhunath-temple-500.jpg

l-r: gbx, jhoshea (not pictured)

WATCHING U

shit, i gotta go to a barbeque <------ L@@K ANOTHER ONE YOU GUYS DON'T HAVE, PS AUSTRALIA DOESN'T COUNT SINCE THEY DON'T KNOW HOW TO MAKE SAUCES

UH O!

there are many suburban/exurban areas in which you'd have to walk for miles to get to any commercial establishment.

I live in one, more or less.

I actually read Ayn Rand for the first time when I was visiting India at 15. I was bored as hell and saw We the Living on a bookshelf (of my uncle's elderly parents). I don't think she's at all marginal in the US or Canada but I also think of her pretty much totally as a pop culture figure, not as someone 'you should know' if you've studied philosophy and the social sciences.

(A lot of these things exist in Canada but I'm not sure if that's supposed to count or not.)

god i hate freeedom so much

We've TOTALLY done this thread before. I mentioned calling the bill "the check" on the other thread.

No, I'm American (gbx). Why exactly?

Trust me, as a half-English half-Indian guy who knows a fair bit about these things, the Yanks are not at the stage where all those countries they lord it over are beating them at sports they invented = they have failed at imperialism.

i'm not calling Ayn Rand marginal, i'm just trying to disabuse Tuomas of the notion that she is known and loved by the majority or even a significant minority of Americans

Except when it's Cuba winning the World Baseball Championship. xpost

decent mexican food

I think they have this in Mexico.

"trying to disabuse Tuomas of the notion"

not that many mexicans in europe obvs xxxpost

There is certainly weak pissy beer outside the US as anyone who has had the misfortune to drink Fosters will attest.

There are also some wonderful IPAs from the US

disabusing Tuomas=ilx party foul

Yeah but Mexican food outside the U.S.?

...

uh

I think it was a joke.

Is circumcision big outside the U.S.? (I mean as done regularly on all male infants, not pubescent female genital mutilation.)

It's big right here!

these are more urban "inner-ring suburbs"

aka trolleyburbs. in general the farther south and/or west you go, the newer the suburbs and the more auto-dependent the whole culture. big northeastern cities tend to have older suburbs, often with actual town centers. but even those places have sprouted lots of non-walkable development on their fringes. and yes the no-walking all-auto culture is a stereotype but it's also a real and very widespread thing. american residential and commercial development for at least the last 60 years has been almost entirely centered around automobile dependency. i had several friends in high school who lived in stereotypical suburban subdivisions (my favorite one was called "loire valley"), and none of them had sidewalks or were within walking distance of anything except highways. all of which is obviously an intersection of some specific things about american culture, the persistence for years of cheap gas, and the ready availability of open, developable land.

(sorry)

There should be some kind of international law so that you can't walk six blocks without being able to get (good) Mexican food.

Yeah, the circumcision thing is interesting since even in Canada IIRC it's only done on like 10% of boys. (Something like 90% in the US?) I imagined it'd be common in Israel though.

Is circumcision big outside the U.S.?

I hear the Jews might be kind of into that shit...

circumcision never really took of here in general. It's mostly seen as a jewish thing

Yeah, pretty common. xxpost

Abbott, It's kinda genital mutilation when done to males, too (not nearly as bad, obv)-- I want 85% or whatever of my sensation back!!!!

uh-oh

There was some joke where Billy Crystal was naked and someone was eying him warily. "Too Jewish?" he said. I didn't get it bcz I didn't know he meant 'circumcision,' bcz I think everyone I knew was circumsized. (Not that I'm the locker room inspector...but my friends and I did an informal survey in HS and 83 out of 84 (men) said they were. Surprisingly a lot of them didn't know. !!!)

Aw, I'm with you, Rabies. Very much so. But I've found people don't want you telling them not to circumsize their babies.

Did anyone see that Nip/Tuck where the kid circumsized himself? I wanted to kill – KILL – that insecure little dipshit.

My kids if I ever have any = so not circumcised.

privatized health care

“Circumcision is startling, all right, particularly when performed by a garlicked old man upon the glory of a newborn body. . . Circumcision is everything that the pastoral is not, and, to my mind, reinforces what the world is about, which isn’t strifeless unity. . . circumcision gives the lie to the womb-dream of life in the beautiful state of innocent prehistory, the appealing idyll of living naturally, unencumbered by man-made ritual.”

my man philip r0th^^

There aren't that many real suburbs in the US ... people just call anything that's not a city "the suburbs". I grew up in the suburbs of NYC and there are sidewalks, trains, buses, etc.

Most places with no sidewalks, etc., are exurban or rural kinda places, and it's not too surprising that they aren't all that well developed.

-- burt_stanton, Sunday, 25 May 2008 23:16 (29 minutes ago) Link

This isn't exactly true. In older east coast areas there are trains and well planned suburbs but certainly in the midwest and south the majority of suburbs aren't served well by public transportation and lack sidewalks and this has only gotten worse. In fact where I'm from, people have moved further and further from the city and you can see how neighborhoods evolve as you drive away. Directly outside of the city there are suburbs that were made in the early 60s where there are sidewalks, but about 15 minutes further away there are the new suburbs where huge amounts of people are sprawling to, where they are building gigantic houses super far from each other.

Yahoo Serious.

Circumcision was quite the norm in the 70s, from what I can recall, even outside of jewish culture. It fell out of favour from the 80s due to health/why do it reasons didn't it?

Um, Yahoo Serious is australian.

i know, i was trying to make some nonsensical joke.

My grandpa had to be circumcised when he joined the marines :( Nearly passed out from the pain.

dell: hey you keep him, we dont want him.

leaf peeping?

College sports?

jam bands?

As someone who grew up in a suburban place where I had to walk two miles down streets with no sidewalks to catch the bus, yes those places most certainly exist.

decent mexican food
-- gbx, Sunday, May 25, 2008 6:13 PM (46 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

freedom
-- jhøshea, Sunday, May 25, 2008 6:19 PM (40 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

grits
-- gbx, Sunday, May 25, 2008 6:19 PM (40 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

indian reservations
-- gbx, Sunday, May 25, 2008 6:22 PM (37 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

funnel cake
-- jhøshea, Sunday, May 25, 2008 6:23 PM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

https://www.tootstubing.com/catalog/images/God_Bless_America.jpg

Also, I've never had a problem with my circumsizedness and don't get what the fuss is about it.

I did not travel anywhere on foot until college

Trayce, there was a weird effort to push him here back in the late eighties, when the film Young Einstein came out. Um, he never quite caught on over here, though.

Rev, just the thought that something I relly enjoy could be much better and I didn't get a say in the matter.

relly=really

how do kids in sidewalk-less suburbs get about?

We don't have funnel cakes here but we have very similar friend-batter dusted with icing sugar carny type snacks, like the italian ones which I forget the name of now. They're ususally in a thin square or twisty bowtie shape.

Their parents drive them, unless they're like my parents and say "Ha! Walk." xp

FRIEND batter? lol. Fried batter. o_0

Yeah we walked lots as kids! We used to walk to school sometimes, and always had to walk or bike ourselves to the local park or pool.

i used to ride my bike the 3-4 miles to my friends' houses, but there weren't a lot of bikes on those roads.

Pep bands? Southern Baptism?

Circumcision of non-Jewish boys is a good one. I was with a Scottish girl one time and she sort of freaked out, "I've never seen that before!"

(a few times my mom drove me to an actual suburban bus stop to take the bus in to visit a friend in the city. there were not many people at the suburban bus stop -- mostly elderly folks and housecleaners who took the bus out to do their rounds and then took the bus back in.)

Does anyone call anyone "hon" outside the US?

Weird man, it must've sucked to live in a suburb like that. We walked everywhere ... school ... the German deli down the street... downtown ... to the bus to NYC, etc. The local streets were mainly walking streets, so the neighborhood kids would set up wiffle/stick ball games, street hockey, etc. Not that bad in retrospect.

spirit rallies

On a few occasions I had to walk about 5 miles from school or from the station.

I've def heard ppl say 'hon'.

Carving faces of leaders into cliffs in a part of the country that would rarely be visited otherwise.

like the italian ones which I forget the name of now

ZEPPOLE

Scariest walking = up the hill after dark with no sidewalks, not even shoulders, no street lights and a fucking train crossing. I probably did this at least 50 times.

Shakers.

Quakers.

dumbed-down and/or fast-casual chain restaurants featuring region or nationality-specific foods. i.e. cracker barrel (old-timey american food) P.F. Changs (chinese)

Please feel free to correct me on this topic

There are still Shakers? I think they're orig. from England?

The Electoral College

Fuck! Shakers are from teh England! At least we can claim Mormons, and Abbott.

Although Abbott has been imported outside of the U.S.

Mesmerism!

Looks like the Quakers are, too!

Yeah, I was thinking of the electoral college.

(If Canada counts, then reserves, spirit rallies, funnel cake, and exotic fast-food chains [Manchu Wok, Pizza Pizza, Indian Flavour] don't. I've never been to a spirit rally or eaten funnel cake though.)

Spelling cheques from the bank like "check"?

peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? when i went to school in england my classmates thought this was really really weird.

The first time I lived away from my parents was when I had a summer job in Jasper Natl Park, Alberta. There was at least one day when I ate 6 pb&j sandwiches.

Disnified nu-teenpop.

That's because jelly = Jello in England. Call it jam and you're a totally normal person.

it wasn't cuz i called it jelly, it's cuz they'd never seen a peanut butter sandwich before. (this was in a small town in 1979, peanut butter may have more of a u.k. presence now. although i don't recall it being terribly evident when i lived there in '90-'91 either.)

spirit rallies

is this the same as pep rallies? And fight songs and stuff? US friends always get all o_0 when I mention that no-one used to go to my school's sports games unless they were, like, substitutes.

I'd hide backstage during pep rallies.

Wait, are pep rallies like mandatory?

They were mandatory at my school. You had to find the right teachers who also thought they were bullshit and would let you sneak out.

Also Mormons are everywhere. Well, leaf peepers, Mt. Rushmore and Thanksgiving.

We have Thanksgiving in Canada but it's a month earlier. Memorial Day probably works.

I've always considered peanut butter and jam sandwiches a bizarre combination, and so has everyone else I've discussed it with

Some of our sports stuff was mandatory, like the yearly swimming and athletics carnivals, mainly. Hate hate hated swim carnival - I can't swim, the pool had very little shade, and the whole thing made non-athletic twits like me feel extremely self concious what with the being outdoors and ppl trying to FORCE you into at least one race. Dudes, I CANT SWIM, thanks for letting everyone else know AND making me look like a dork.

Fuck forced athleticism.

somebody should start a concomitant u.k.-culture thread.

I recall that we had to go to like student rallies in support of the 1st XV and the 1st VIII and bullshit like that. But I did go to a sporty macho-y all boys Greater Public Skooool

fuck, that's *Great* public school not greater. shit.

The school warcry did have some Aboriginal language in it which is cool in retrospect.

somebody should start a concomitant u.k.-culture thread.

But is UK culture still dominant enough in the world to make the question interesting?

No.

What about summer camp? With Native American themes?

http://www.ottawacamps.com/overnight.php

Some of our sports stuff was mandatory, like the yearly swimming and athletics carnivals, mainly.

yeah, like-- mandatory sports day where everyone takes part, I kind of expect that everywhere. But the whole pep rallies/whole-school involvement in hyping up school team games thing seems particular -- it kind of goes without saying in US TV shows and cultural stuff and it took me forever to get my head around it. The closest we ever got was announcements in assembly.

there are summer camps in the uk! but not usually for more than a week.

Yeah pep rallies and cheerleading and whatnot does seem particularly american, to my mind. Ditto summer camp in the US sense of it (being on a camp for yr entire months long summer hols? Barf).

are there no Scots on this thread? you can buy deep fried Mars bars in Scotland all the time, those dudes will deep fry anything

God bless them

Posted a pic of a deep fried Mars Bar upthread somewhere.

haha, I have purchased a couple of guns from the dealer pictured in the first gun show photo (recognize the yellow signs)

In Australia now I've noticed that a lot of cinemas are doing the allocated seating thing which can suck.

They never got over certain things, and now they're all bitter.

But is UK culture still dominant enough in the world to make the question interesting?

i dunno i just like hearing about weird brit stuff.

could also do a canada thread. (poutine! sloan!)

That's the spirit.

charter schools?
for-profit hospitals?
water cooler gossip?
the monthname day, year date format?

the in-your-face non-subtle Seinfeld-esque school of humor?

uh...

Seinfeld has surely been exported outside the US??

xpost

I think he meant that KIND of humour?

Super Bowl Sunday?

Peanut Butter And Jelly - not Jam!

I used to think jelly was just what americans called jam. I didn't know it was different stuff.

FUCKING FAHRENHEIT

There's jelly, jam, preserves, and fruit butter. I prefer preserves.

Hootie and the Blowfish.

I hope and pray, anyway.

Even Americans don't like Hootie and the Blowfish anymore. Or the Dave Matthews Band.

I'm sory Trayce - PB&J just can't be PB&jam - it would be like calling Fish&Chips Fish & Fries. Some things are sacred.

I imagine so, al! :) I've never had it, I'm curious tbh. We can buy that other stuff here tho, fluffernutter? the PB and fluff mix?

I live in a big jewish area so there's loads of imported US kosher snack foods you wouldnt usually see here, like hersheys stuff and gooey junk in jars and matzos crackers.

I remember in high school everyone making fun of that pep rally crap... only the toolbags nobody liked ever did that cheerleading shit. Nobody went to sports games or anything like that ... maybe it's different in the South/Midwest? They seem to be into that football shit.

at my high school, football was the biggest thing going, literally over half the town goes to the annual homecoming game. (appalachia.)

bitterly clinging to their pep rallies.

Yeah, that's so weird. It's like each region in the US is a totally different country with its own language and customs.

I'm going to be a complete dimbulb here but what exactly does homecoming mean, anyway? lol I should look on google. I mean I know about homecoming games and dances but whats it referring to? Homecoming of what? Team tour?

oh.. that's another one, isn't it? homecoming? i have no idea how it started.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homecoming
The tradition of Homecoming most likely evolved from alumni football games held at colleges and universities since the late 1800s. Many schools lay claim to having the first Homecoming, but three seem to have the strongest claims: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, The University of Missouri, and Baylor University all held homecoming events in 1910, 1911, and 1909, respectively, though Baylor University did not hold its next homecoming until 1915. The other two traditions were annual events from their beginnings. All of these events had homecoming-like characteristics such as a football game, visiting alumni, and a parade. It is likely that the traditions at these schools and others merged and spread nationwide. By the 1920s homecoming was widely celebrated across the nation.

Trayce--I'm American and I don't know either!

But I also tend to be kinda oblivious, so...

--------

Oh. Well now I know.

Homecoming, welcoming back of former residents and alumni

Ahhhh, now I get it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:USA-centric

Final Fantasy VII???

Babysitting? rly?

Not having sampled every example of American culture that exists outside the USA, I could be mistaken, but:

The cakewalk.
The barn raising.
Bathtub racing.
The sou'wester hat.

Haha yeah I'm roffling at some of these. Audi? Intraplate earthquake!?

ROFL

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Australia-centric

I love that "alcohol advertising" is one of the only things listed.

Christopher Columbus
Editorial
Common cold
Expatriate
Philosophy of healthcare
Ethical problems using children in clinical trials
Anti-war
Relaxer
Fan loyalty
Preadolescence
Gay pornography
Italian sausage
Nudity and sexuality
Lighthouse keeper
Marbled meat
Middle name
Pseudoscience
Transatlantic relations
Wedding invitation

wtf i can't find one short video of compo in a bathtub on youtube.

These are kind of understandiblish USA-centric:

Transcontinental air speed record
White chocolate
Push poll
Roadside attraction
Milwaukee Electric Tool Corporation
List of Latter Day Saints
Mobile home
JanSport
Halloween costume
Conjugal visit
Antique vehicle registration

I hope 'List of Latter-Day Saints' includes all the dead people & holocaust victims baptised by proxy.

Yeah I'm wondering why Milwaukee Electric Tool Corporation has to have a "worldwide view" uh waht?

"gooey junk in jars " - Trayce

gefiltefish? it is teh nasty IMHO.

I'm just guessing here:

http://www.efdisaster.com/images/kfcfb.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3183/2523714692_7f97606309_o.jpghttp://farm4.static.flickr.com/3245/2522893801_e4a06be706_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3189/2522893731_0c56567acf_o.jpghttp://farm4.static.flickr.com/3128/2522893631_028f50d5ec_o.jpg

http://images.teamsugar.com/files/usr/1/13254/jimmy-dean-pancake-sausage-chocolate-chip-736804.0.jpg

Also: Americans feel obliged to tip because the waiters wouldn't otherwise make a living on their minimum wage.

Actually, waiters often make quite a bit less than minimum wage. Yes, you read that correctly: they make less than the lowest amount that an employer can legally pay an employee per hour. How does that work? I don't know. But hence: tips.

Getting all shikamo feisty on someone. I don't know if that's caught on outside of the America's yet.

http://www.travelizmo.com/archives/2007-winnebago-itasca-impulse.jpg

RVing

I meant sweet gooey things in jars but haha yeah gefiltefish too. Must try that some time, there's a swathe of delis by my house that sell it, and chopped liver and matzah ball soup and etc etc.

WTF @ pancakes and sausage on a stick with chocolate chips

depending on how much you like sardines, pickled herring, and pickled eggs I will advise you towards or from the gefiltefish.
I have a feeling you will be embracing it as another wonderful food...which it is.
it's just too gelatinous and floating for me.

My favorite sandwich, as a kid, was peanut butter and mayonnaise and lettuce. YUM!
I think that's uniquely Mercan.

Also, having the capitol - D.C. - not exist as a state, but only as a district, and...not have a vote...unique!

http://www.15q.net/us1/dc03.jpg

I love going to D.C. because it is like I am visiting a foreign land! And it's really kind of small - the tourist /seat of government part. And the museums are free!
it's really like going to oz.
And,yes, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain...

I think Disneyland is the opposite.

No way is white chocolate "USA-centric"!

You gotta love that "nudity and sexuality" is among the list of USA-centric things, because Americans obviously are well known for their liberal, straightforward attitudes towards these issues...

i'm not calling Ayn Rand marginal, i'm just trying to disabuse Tuomas of the notion that she is known and loved by the majority or even a significant minority of Americans

I never claimed she was "well known and loved" by the majority of Americans, just that she seems to be a significant figure in American culture who's virtually unknown elsewhere, except maybe the other English-speaking countries. Though if she is, as you say, not known even by a "significant minority" of Americans, surely that means she is marginal then?

decent brass bands

"You gotta love that "nudity and sexuality" is among the list of USA-centric things, because Americans obviously are well known for their liberal, straightforward attitudes towards these issues"

isn't this pretty much why you started this thread, so you could toss out passive-aggressive challops about the US.

ayn rand is a big fucking joke and is generally not studied in us universities, she's more like a figure nerdy, selfish teens gravitate to in order to justify their libertarian ways

Sorry, I didn't mean to sound so smug, I just found it weird that "nudity and sexuality" is on the list of "USA-centric" things.

I haven't been outside the country in nearly a decade, so maybe this isn't the case anymore, but..... MUFFINS

I don't mean what we would call an English Muffin, but this http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:vO4yMCao3Qd0cM:http://bp3.blogger.com/_okV3iYQkL5c/RcuKk-LX3xI/AAAAAAAACbE/oJc5CxgacGM/s400/weight%2Bwatchers%2Bbran%2Bmuffins%2Brecipe.jpg

James Taylor

no problem, ain't no thing
xposts
*mandated nice response courtesy of new ilx*

freshman initiation?

zucchini bread, pumpkin pie

freshman initiation?

Nah, we have that over here. Muffins too. Pumpkin pie, on the other hand, is totally strange in Finland at least.

Mmmmmmm, pie.

I wonder how much the spread of muffins is due to the spread of Starbucks.

It's hard to find canned pumpkin outside the US. Peanut butter and vegetable shortening as well, in some countries. Rows upon rows of canned soups. And all the sweet potatoes I've seen in stores have been imported from the US, which surprised me...where else do they grow sweet potatoes? (Obviously, my only observations of cultural differences take place in grocery stores....)

I did not travel anywhere on foot until college

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That is mind-blowing

Anywhere, like not even to a friend's house or the local park or ice cream place? (Those are the only places I traveled on foot before college...the grocery store and library were only a mile away, but I had a bike.)

My favorite sandwich, as a kid, was peanut butter and mayonnaise and lettuce. YUM!
I think that's uniquely Mercan.

-- aimurchie, Sunday, May 25, 2008 11:06 PM (Sunday, May 25, 2008 11:06 PM) Bookmark Link

More like uniquely you.

I wonder how much the spread of muffins is due to the spread of Starbucks.

There's no Starbucks in Finland, but we've had muffins at least ever since I was a kid.

good to know =)

No Starbucks in Finland! When can I move there?

also guys http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:USA-centric identifies articles "containing information specific to the United States of America without adequately covering differences found in other parts of the world." So no-one thinks nudity and sexuality is exclusively part of American culture.

Calling the letter Z "zee" instead of "zed"?

No Starbucks in Finland! When can I move there?

I think Finland has been pretty slow to to import American fast food chains. We only got our first McDonalds in the 1980s and our first Subway this decade. And there's still no KFC, Burger King, etc.

Karkkila Fried Moose does good business tho, right?

My dad's favorite sandwich was also PB and mayo with lettuce. It put me off mayo for 15 years. His second prefernece was liverwurst and ketchup. This put me off liverwurst 4 LIFE.

I could definitely go for some liverwurst about now. Fear the odds of scoring it on Newland Ave on a bank holiday monday are slim tho.

But I'm gonna go try, dammit.

IPA beer? I know they have that in the UK but its not the same! Aren't America IPA beers closer to how the original IPAs brewed for India were, and the UK IPAs aren't like that now?

I said hooters upthread, but was too tired to offer an explanation. What I meant is that America seems to make a big thing of associating sexuality with health, innocence and wholesomeness - rather than the sleaze, experience and cynicism we might get here. See also the predominance in popular culture of wet t-shirt competitions, cheerleaders, pyjama parties.

When your constitution protects the right to pornography, going wild for such tameness seems a bit weird.

deep fried twinkies

-- gbx, Sunday, 25 May 2008 23:12 (Yesterday) Link

^^^ not sure that's even out of MN yet, to be honest

-- gbx, Sunday, 25 May 2008 23:12 (Yesterday) Link

Yes, I have had one of these at Rhodeside Grill in Arlington, VA.

Deep fried macaroni and cheese as served at Grumpy's, Minneapolis. Deep fried cheese curds also.

I have suggested there's a secret underground tunnel between Glasgow and the Twin Cities where the fry babies play. On the TC side we don't do this to haggis or pizza yet, on the Weegie side there are no cheese curds, mac'n'cheese, Key Lime pie or Twinkies to contend with.

http://images.teamsugar.com/files/usr/1/13254/jimmy-dean-pancake-sausage-chocolate-chip-736804.0.jpg

would eat

Chocolate chips and sausage?!

would spew

deep fried cheese curds actually sounds kind of amazing.

x-post

I'm pretty sure I've seen a deep fried macaroni cheese pie in a chippy in a couple of places in Scotland.

Deep fried cheese curds are amazing. I only ever eat them at the Minnesota State Fair. Imagine they do them in Wisconsin too.

A friend from home just IMed me with "happy Memorial Day!" I totally forgot, as it's a work day here. So I add that to the thread.

November 11 is Remembrance Day here, same thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheese_curds

Not quite, we have Veterans Day on November 11 as well.

Anywhere, like not even to a friend's house or the local park or ice cream place?

Ice cream place = bay of strip mall 2 miles up 35-45mph road very likely w/o sidewalks and no shade, plus then the trek across parking lot of said strip mall. When you live in these places you drive everywhere. We were very lucky that our neighborhood by pure blind luck was near a (bad) elementary school so we could walk there at least.

My world growing up. Big gray area at the right-hand side is where you might find an ice cream place. Legally zoned out of everywhere else.

Worth reading: Suburban Nation. Skim when you get to their architectural solutions, which are kind of disturbing whitewashed nostalgia - but the analysis of what contemporary American "suburbs" actually are, and how they actually work, is spot-on and quite accessible.

that link totally worked a second ago! fuck! Can I just paste it?

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=decatur,+GA&ie=UTF8&t=h&ll=33.839338,-84.281702&spn=0.040208,0.069351&z=14&iwloc=addr

Ah, I see. My town was perhaps unusual in having an actual country-style ice cream place (literal name: "Dairy Barn," no cows except for the huge one on the outside wall, picnic tables outside and a couple of video game booths inside, parking lot full of cars and area outside full of kids on foot and bikes). But these are probably vanishing.

I believe that the 'USA-centric' list refers to wiki articles whose content is USA-centric. This doesn't mean that their subject is USA-centric, though it might mean that in some cases.

You gotta love that "nudity and sexuality" is among the list of USA-centric things, because Americans obviously are well known for their liberal, straightforward attitudes towards these issues...

how would you know?

Though if she is, as you say, not known even by a "significant minority" of Americans, surely that means she is marginal then?

No. A 'significant minority' refers to a large number that is less than 50%.

Deep fried cheese curds are amazing. I only ever eat them at the Minnesota State Fair. Imagine they do them in Wisconsin too.

-- suzy, Monday, 26 May 2008 12:24 (2 hours ago) Link

this is sort of a wisconsin/minnesota divide. you can find deep-fried cheese curds at bars here, but generally speaking they are squeaky and unfried in WI.

The recent Dave Matthews Band poll made me think of this thread (and I see they were mentioned a couple of times already)... If it hadn't been for that infamous ILM thread, I don't think I'd ever even heard of them, yet it seems they were/are super popular in the US?

grits

― gbx, Sunday, May 25, 2008 6:19 PM (eight years ago)

I wonder if anyone's tried selling southern cuisine/soul food outside the States and did it crash like the Hindenburg.

I'm going to be a complete dimbulb here but what exactly does homecoming mean, anyway? lol I should look on google. I mean I know about homecoming games and dances but whats it referring to? Homecoming of what? Team tour?

Lol, my fiancée and I were asking the same thing a couple of months ago. I should probably research it now that I'm working in the States.

i think it's like the first home game after a spell of a few 'away' games

Homecoming is an annual tradition in the United States. People, towns, high schools, and colleges come together, usually in late September or early October, to welcome back alumni and former residents. It is built around a central event, such as a banquet and, most often, a game of American football, or, on occasion, basketball, ice hockey or soccer.

I'm an American and I wasn't aware that homecomings involved alumni. a lot of American high schools have 'spirit weeks' in September/October where students come to school dressed up according to a daily theme (togas, class colors, etc.) and the grade level with the most 'spirit' is declared the victor at an end-of-the-week assembly. spirit week also includes more typical homecoming events like dances and parades and home football games. it's a lot of fun if you're a fuckin idiot.

It was fun. Especially on hat day.

to put it less incisively, spirit week is a lot fun if you have friends

my high school didn't have hat day so maybe that was part of the problem

the balls to stand up to a dictator

― gbx, Sunday, May 25, 2008 7:20 PM (eight years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Homecoming is far less of a big deal than it was 50 years ago when massive homecoming parades were well-attended and such

I never understood the true meaning of homecoming until I went to college. It wasn't like a bunch of 35-year-olds showed back up at our high school cafeteria and reminisced about their old lockers.

But boy, a bunch of those people showed up on campus wearing nametags during college homecoming week. Didn't hurt that we were playing Nebraska on Saturday either.

My Austrailan wife keeps confusing me with American culture she's heard about and the ones she hasn't.

Like Match Game with Gene Rayburn. YES.

"Mr. Roboto" by Styx. NO.

And how I envy her for not knowing who Jimmy Buffet is.

Sport or sports is the main one. Though basketball is pretty popular throughout the world - not in the UK though, thank God. Also a whole lot of TV from the 60s-90s.

the Ford F-150 and other big-ass pickup trucks

I don't get how sport or sports applies here. It's not just basketball, baseball is played all over the Americas and the Far East. Volleyball comes from America too. Isn't American football the only exception?

Canada is a predictable exception to a lot of these

Canadians basically play American football

Totally Eurocentric viewpoint, I confess I have no idea how popular baseball is outside the US, it's invisible here.

American Football is more popular tbh.

Too similar to cricket is probably why it hasn't caught on there

canadian football (not american football)

cfl

and its popularity has grown in the past 10 years i'd say

I have no idea how popular baseball is outside the US

Extremely popular in Japan, Korea, Central America and the Caribbean.

ya it's the national sport in japan

So that's why the West Indies are shit at cricket now :(

Windies p good at the form of cricket that most resembles baseball

28% of top-level professional baseball players in the US were born outside of the US

(xp) True. I like baseball btw, the little I've seen of it.

I find the 'baseball killed windies cricket' argument a bit specious though

ya I've been getting into baseball on Youtube, it seems p exciting really except the commentators sometimes overhype how good the plays are

"BARE HANDED PLAY!!!" yeah pal that is every cricket play ever except for the catcher

(xxp) I wasn't being entirely serious there.

"I wonder if anyone's tried selling southern cuisine/soul food outside the States and did it crash like the Hindenburg."

http://www.louisiana.de/

well i don't know the details of that argument but if investment is going to baseball rather than cricket because of market size, i can see it being the case

baseball is very popular worldwide

you drink beer, eat hot dogs and chat for the first 6 innings then the last inning gets exciting and it's over

http://www.mainz-athletics.de/

baseball is very popular worldwide

Not so sure about that. Beyond the places already mentioned.

it's pretty popular in central america

but you don't really see big leagues because of economic reasons so all the good players want to play for the mlb

I imagine, I didn't know it was popular in the Caribbean though, I'd just assumed soccer and basketball had killed cricket there.

Mexico has a big and venerable baseball league that's ranked Triple-A which means one level below top US level. Lotta South Americans play baseball too: Venezuelans, Ecuadorians, etc.

A fun game to play when flying into a European airport is to try and spot a baseball diamond amongst the endless soccer pitches. They're there! I've seen them!

I'd think baseball might be one of the Domenican Republic's largest exports. There are lots of pros from that small nation.

There are now a couple pros from Australia I believe. The Reds had a German that flirted with the big leagues too.

there are a few soul food restaurants here in Paris, though I've never been. apparently one makes chicken and waffles and I think I'd like to try it!

I don't think baseball is popular anywhere in Europe? Here in Finland we have our own localised version of it, but it's considered a bit of a rural sport, admitting that you follow basically makes everyone think you're a country bumpkin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pes%C3%A4pallo

"admitting that you follow it"

so much for finnish socialism

Huh?

A fun game to play when flying into a European airport is to try and spot a baseball diamond amongst the endless soccer pitches. They're there! I've seen them!

Where? When I first moved to London, near where I used to lived, there was an old cricket ground that seemed to have been converted to play baseball, I assumed it was used by American ex-pats, I never saw anyone use it though. Also weird coming to London and seeing outdoor basketball courts - not exactly a great idea given the weather over here - they don't seem to be used much either, I suppose you can play football on them though.

London doesn't have enough US military bases I guess.

Berlin has a baseball field though for sure

Was going to say Black Friday, in the shopping sense, but apparently that is being exported to many places as we speak

They definitely have that in London. I shudder to think what it would be like in Stoke-on-Trent or somewhere though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbciWgx8dXE

Yeah, places like that are where I'd expect it to follow the American model most closely

And how I envy her for not knowing who Jimmy Buffet is.

There's a Margaritaville in Darling Harbour now. We still don't have Jimmy Buffett though.

http://i.imgur.com/j3F2YEZ.png

You're welcome, Australia.

One of the more fun conversations I had with a random tourist while traveling was in a restaurant in Japan where the person at the next table was an English baseball umpire who apparently traveled all over Europe umpiring games. He also spoke almost perfect French. We talked about the Expos, who had recently moved to Washington at the time.

is that "goats, cheese, and margaritas" or "goats' cheese and margaritas"

are "boat drinks" a thing or just a Seamus O'Connell-ism?

I've visited Australia three times in the past three years and the number of fried chicken joints in Sydney has increased exponentially.

we've had Red Rooster for decades

do they have slurp-based drinks outside the u.s.? because they really are everywhere here. and now with the slurp-based coffee technology, even more everywhere than they already were. and they were already everywhere.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/6f/d6/bd/6fd6bd959033320146ecc425d1fa2608.jpg

Yes, that's been around for years, decades in fact.

OP: judging by ILX itself, American acceptance of use of pejoratives like "spaz" or "retard" as juvenile teasing and banter.

Not sure if USA has exclusivity on that one.

what about chili cheese fries outside of the states/canada?

retard is on its way out here, but i didn't know anyone considered 'spazz' offensive until about 2 years ago.....

the permeability between the USA culture and the rest of the world is pretty damn high, but especially with regard to commonwealth countries. I think a lot of that has to do with multinational corporate ascendancy, rather than the irresistible attractiveness of slurpees.

the simpsons was a hit around the world. then everyone wanted a slusheeeeeeee.

just didn't know if they were as ubiquitous elsewhere. they are at every gas station mini-mart here.

beef jerky post-simpsons sure did become a thing here. before that, you really only had bart's slim jims in every convenience store. not huge bags of jerky. i mean, it existed. but it wasn't everywhere. every drug store in the united states has a beef jerky aisle now.

what about chili cheese fries outside of the states/canada?

In Ireland, the "taco chip" is considered one of our great delicacies

http://i66.tinypic.com/15n6csz.jpg

surpassed only by the subtle continental charms of the garlic cheese chip

https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/05/6e/85/50/cheese-and-garlic-fries.jpg

does taco refer to a mexican or central american taco or some other taco

the "taco" is not literal, it's poetry

the simpsons was a hit around the world. then everyone wanted a slusheeeeeeee.
just didn't know if they were as ubiquitous elsewhere. they are at every gas station mini-mart here.

in the late 80s in the UK every petrol station and corner shop had a Slush Puppie (or knockoff) machine but I haven't seen one for a while except maybe at seaside resorts (and cinemas?)

it could be that I am frequenting a less slushie-inclined class of shops or just not noticing them so much now I am not 9 years old, however

ILX is the still only place that I've ever seen spaz on a restricted words list

I can still remember when the worst thing Tiger Woods ever did was say that word in England.

ever seen spaz on a restricted words list

the correct term is hypertonic

jesus christ nn did you really just have the perfect tee up to post a taco fries and go with the fuckin suoermacs version?

man oh man he wont want to see that again tonight alan

the incorrect verb usage in this thread title drives me crazy

it's passive, not incorrect

can't believe biscuits & gravy hasn't been mentioned in nearly nine years of this thread

It would be a difficult trick to import US culture into the US. But if there were some kind of tax advantage to exporting and reimporting it, I'm sure it's been tried.

I thought it was incorrect until just now but eh you can work with it

"Outside of the US, there are parts of American culture that have never really been imported"

Do European zoos have American alligators in them? They must look pretty freaky to people in Finland, eh, Tuomas?

I dunno, the only zoo I've been to in the last 20 years (if aquariums don't count) was in America.

Was about to say baby showers but, inevitably ...

In the United Kingdom, baby showers are not historically customary, although have become more common with younger generations following the import of American culture.

(High) school proms are now a thing in the UK now.

Cracker Barrel Old Country Store

chicken and DUMPLINGS!?
chicken-fried steak?

Hominy grits

chicken-fried steak's basically the same idea as wiener schnitzel or steak milanese, I think

Do any non-Americans here know who these people are?

http://i.imgur.com/2k8kMmW.jpg

No.

No idea.

I know what it is now, because I looked it up but, no, this did not make it to UK TV.

I thought it was a very young Mark Harmon at the back but...it's not.

Ronald Reagan?

It's strange, because it's definitely "all-American" but the format is straight up British, right down to the woman basically playing a character in drag.

Mike, when you say you looked it up, do you mean, with a special computer program that you wrote that can enter images into a search and get words in return?

I googled 'worst US sitcoms' and think I figured it out.

chicken-fried steak's basically the same idea as wiener schnitzel or steak milanese, I think

I get what you're saying in an abstract sense but as an American who loves chicken-fried steak and schnitzel I really think of these as totally different things

Mike, when you say you looked it up, do you mean, with a special computer program that you wrote that can enter images into a search and get words in return?

― the pinefox, donderdag 5 januari 2017 15:36 (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Reverse image search iirc

https://tineye.com/search/a2622d50abb1b3fece10f3f90a3609d31c012e41/

holy crow i had no memory that both rue mclanahan and betty white were on "mama's family"

Hate it when my old posts show up on Google.

http://i.imgur.com/qOf9Xr0.png

those original sketches with carol used to freak me out when i was a kid. the pathos and bathos. all of a sudden her show turned into tennessee williams.

mama's family is not one of the worst US sitcoms!!!!!!!

Mike, when you say you looked it up, do you mean, with a special computer program that you wrote that can enter images into a search and get words in return?

If I had written that bit of code, I wouldn't be doing this job... ;)

Right-click, "search Google for image" (this is in the Chrome browser).

watching how i met your mother with my kids i knew they would have no idea who bob barker was - barney thought his dad was bob - but they gave enough context that you didn't really have to know. there are few things as american as bob barker and TPIR. i figure most people watching that show abroad wouldn't know who he was.

but t.v. is endless. plenty of things that don't make it outside the states that are huge here probably.

Jeopardy is quintessentially American too isn't it?

oh yeah. and wheel of fortune.

but The Price Is Right was one of those things that was just hugely popular for so long and it crossed a lot of lines. all kinds of people watched it and were into it and loved bob.

We had a version of that in the UK I think

Wheel of Fortune that is

Same here. But I can't remember Jeopoardy ever having been copied to UK/Western-EU countries.

There were UK versions of both Price is Right and Wheel of Fortune (and Hollywood Squares was known as Celebrity Squares here)

Canada is outside the US though.

I was going to say that Wheel of Fortune is now a global format like The Price is Right, but Jeopardy! didn't make it elsewhere. But, no, it's international too, and there were three different attempts to make it in the UK (C4, ITV and Sky One in the 1980s/90s), none of which I remember.

http://i.imgur.com/IFxFZQg.jpg

popular game show hosts probably more beloved and trusted than most newscasters here. serious cult followings.

do/did other countries get american soap operas? such a huge phenomena here. especially in the 70s/80s/90s. like, bigger than big. but kinda invisible if you weren't a cult-member.

I think I said it upthread but there's a hell of a lot of US TV (good and bad) that has never made it to the UK (at least). One of the reasons why a lot US ILXors' bantz is completely incomprehensible... that and sport... and politics.

(xp) For laffs, I can't think of any other reason, there was one US soap that used to get shown in the afternoons over here, you're talking years ago though.

Jncos. Perhaps candy raving in general?

i'm just guessing that the 80's and 90's was peak viewership for soaps here, but i could be wrong. they were big in the 50's and 60's too. but i liken their popularity to pro wrestling. pre-wrestlemania wrestling was more of a cult thing and then it became huge pop culture and the same with soaps.

seriously, these two people were bigger than Jesus at one point in time.

http://a3.files.biography.com/image/upload/c_fit,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTMxMDA3MzI1MzA4NzI1ODkx.jpg

Leslie Crowther's Price Is Right is the first gameshow I remember watching and enjoying (unless Ultra Quiz came first and was actually real).

Knots Landing was shown in the UK, initially evening then afternoons (ending up years behind the US after hiatus). Don't think I ever saw that though, was only big on Dynasty.

Not only did I not recognise pplains's picture but I've never heard of Mama's Family. Odd.

Other countries may have alligators but do they have alligator wrestling?

do/did other countries get american soap operas? such a huge phenomena here. especially in the 70s/80s/90s. like, bigger than big. but kinda invisible if you weren't a cult-member.

― scott seward, donderdag 5 januari 2017 16:20 (twenty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sadly, yes. ATWT, B&B and all that stuff. My nan was a decades long fan.

And, yeah, Sudbury-born Lisgar Collegiate/University of Ottawa alumnus Alex Trebek def does not belong here.

I do remember The Carol Burnett Show though.

It's all true. I have probably said this before on this thread c. 8 years ago, but -- the US idea of 'late show' as in 'late night talk show' has never happened here in the same way.

People have tried to do it, eg J Ross (who was perhaps somehow obsessed with emulating this US model), G Norton -- but would anyone claim that those minor efforts have had any clout next to the perceived importance of these late talk shows in the US?

This discrepancy has always left me quite bemused by the US model -- unable to see why it is so important and why smart people take it seriously. I was in the US c.2001 and was told that 'Conan O'Brien' was the coolest talk show host, the one for hip people or something -- and it was like watching Michael Aspel c.1985. Baffling.

I was going to ask about high school marching bands but apparently some Ottawa high schools have these now.

I think the thread topic has always been a good one, and remains a good one even now, even though the gap (US / UK) has almost certainly narrowed in some ways in the last 8 years (eg: news is liable to be consumed in the UK via Guardian website which leads a lot on US news and media; eg R and D primaries through first half 2016 were big rolling stories day after day as they wouldn't have been in previous decades. Though yes I am aware that if you go to the US you suddenly find that the Guardian website looks radically different again).

I had no idea about the image search thing that Mike used. It's quite reassuring to know that this UK-based model of ignorance has remained unchanged in the last 15 years.

i had chicken fried steak once or twice in the us and afair it's a lot less flat than a schnitzel, both the coating and the meat.

what were some of the last u.s. shows to make it big in the u.k.? are they all just the same? sopranos, lost, etc. now it doesn't matter as much i guess cuzza streaming. everything is probably big somewhere.

or in Finland...sorry, threadstarter...

(and i guess by big i mean popcult big. people quoting lines at work, people getting their hair cut like jennifer aniston, etc...)

and for all you brits out there: PEOPLE SURE DO LIKE DR. WHO IN THE STATES. in case you didn't know that. never seen anything like it for something so old and moldy.

It's been new and shiny for over ten years though.

The Americans ended up on ITV Saturday evenings which surprised me a lot. But that's not big enough.

can't even count the number of little kids i've seen dressed up like a dalek on halloween. you see, halloween is a big holiday here....you can look it up.

did you write some sort of computer programme enabling us to look it up, Scott?

Halloween comes after the holiday where we burn a forest in honor of Christopher Columbus.

I'm told no one outside the US drinks root beer and if given some they find it disgusting

We have root beer here but yes it's fucking disgusting

here, you can put this in your search doohickey...

https://www.wholesalehalloweencostumes.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/cannibal.jpg

and for those of you outside the states a doohickey is....

I bought a root beer last week (albeit for the first time in years). Australian variety though (Bundaberg).

I have always loved root beer. Possibly this started long ago when I lived in the US. There are a few things that then became somewhat familiar to me - root beer, Hershey bars, trick or treating - that I suppose are now globalistically familiar in the UK but were, I think, not familiar back then.

ooh, i thought of a good one: candlepin bowling. and also duckpin bowling. i have candlepinned and duckpinned in my life and had a great time doing it. canada candlepins too, i think.

You're just making things up now.

I've noticed a lot more importing of US candy/chocolate bars/sweet snacks here (London and Brighton at least) - not so much because of the quality as just that people are apparently dumb enough to pay £1.80 for a tiny packet of peanut butter M&Ms.

Well if your country would hurry up and discover peanut butter....

I was going to say kickball, but apparently the armed forces successfully got that to catch on in South Korea
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kickball

(it's basically baseball played with a soccer ball)

i hate root beer on its own, but I love root beer floats (ie with icecream)

(it's basically baseball played with a soccer ball)

totally not, kickball can only be played with a pink rubber ball about the size of a soccer ball (ok in conditions of extremity a green rubber ball can be used)

that sounds about right

I seem to remember it being played badly with a four square ball in a pinch

hipster kickball almost ruined a fine sport.

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--nSdX3xsb--/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/18j51chv9lcsqjpg.jpg

Ha, we called that "soccer baseball" when I was in elementary school. "Kickball" obv a better name.

Like to imagine that kickball is actually traveling at high speed towards that dude's nuts

the list of things that originated or came from canada but that the us popularized is long (cf trebek)

was talking to a non-us woman/non-canadian and she said pamela anderson was the all american girl (didn't exactly want to claim responsibility for producing such a person, so i just agreed)

even americans can't tell i'm sure though

It's scary how well Canadians blend in with those in the USA. You could be in a room with a Canadian and not even –

https://i.imgur.com/jN9mWWhh.jpg

Wait, I take it back.

hes a special flower

was talking to a non-us woman/non-canadian and she said pamela anderson was the all american girl (didn't exactly want to claim responsibility for producing such a person, so i just agreed)

Heh, a British drummer who was doing a PhD on popular music once asked me to name some famous popular musicians from Canadian history because he couldn't think of many. He was a little startled when I started naming "Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, ...".

a little known rocker named bryan adams u mightve heard of

the canadian government has apologized many times for bryan adams

PBS did American Masters episodes on Neil and Joni. Dunno if they thought, eh, what's the difference, or if it was too much trouble to change the series name to North American Masters for two episodes.

Macdonalds UK offered root beer for a few years, but eventually admitted defeat in the face of britishes indifference.

Saturday Night Live - even in its alleged glory years - has always seemed unfunny and bad - I imagine Not the Nine O'Clock News would be received in the USA in the same way.

I thought Neil was a US citizen? Don't know about Joni.

Don't forget, UK had a Friday/Saturday night live comedy thing for a few years - on C4. Elton, Fry & Laurie, Rik and Ade (though they filmed their bits - setting themselves on fire, etc), various US and UK stand-ups, under-rehearsed sketches, bands, etc. I'm sure that doesn't hold up well. If it did at the time.

"Macdonalds UK"

wait, do they spell it that way in the u.k.? that would be cool.

xxxxp

feel like americans are more like who cares
while canadians rationalize it as american refers to a person living in the americas, which we are a part of so we're good

even when non-na bands tour i find they announce canadian dates under america/us often

I thought Neil was a US citizen? Don't know about Joni.

As of last May, Reuters was reporting:

Neil Young, a Canadian citizen, can't vote in the upcoming U.S. presidential election - but the 70-year-old rocker has plenty to say about it.

The drummer I mentioned did know about Bryan Adams, actually, and was hoping I could come up with examples to redeem Canada, other than Rush, whom he loves. He thought Shania Twain was from Tennessee.

"the canadian government has apologized many times for bryan adams"

Have they done so for the Crash Test Dummies? Because that's the bigger offense.

Sorry Scott, that is my misspelling, though I think the overall corporate name is McDonald's UK

my local UK supermarket has started selling imported "Virgil's" root beer, is that a good/known brand US-side?

I bought some before Christmas, still disgusting (ginger beer >>>>> root beer) but I did enjoy the black cherry cream soda

lol I love root beer

(only place I can buy it here is the Chinese supermarket)

my ex loves root beer, don't think i could handle it as a mixer even

(would be all over black cherry soda tho)

jesus christ nn did you really just have the perfect tee up to post a taco fries and go with the fuckin suoermacs version?

a schoolboy error I'll admit

abra is obviously the platonic ideal

ftr this is the "taco" element of the dish

http://www.richsauces.com/our-range/14/flavoured-mayo/taco-mayonnaise

the genuine devil's condiment

xxpost spacecadet virgil's is pretty decent root beer

People have tried to do it, eg J Ross (who was perhaps somehow obsessed with emulating this US model), G Norton -- but would anyone claim that those minor efforts have had any clout next to the perceived importance of these late talk shows in the US?

This discrepancy has always left me quite bemused by the US model -- unable to see why it is so important and why smart people take it seriously. I was in the US c.2001 and was told that 'Conan O'Brien' was the coolest talk show host, the one for hip people or something -- and it was like watching Michael Aspel c.1985. Baffling.

the big-3 or 3+1 (for pbs) national tv network framework lasted for decades and acts as a counterpart to the inscrutable british mentality surrounding the bbc, the fact that something is there, as a fixture, on network tv is always more fundamental than anything else about it and distorts any number of judgments that outsiders would make differently

xp I say it was disgusting but by the end of the bottle it had become faintly charming in a childhood memories of cough mixture kind of way

I used to hate dandelion & burdock, maybe the closest UK equivalent to root beer, but now I'm semi-addicted to the Fentiman's version, so maybe I'd start liking root beer if I kept drinking it

wait, you guys don't like root beer floats? so good. do they have root beer floats in europe? #ontopic

i don't like to be mean about or single out someone for their looks/face, but conan just gets more bizarre looking every year. like he's wearing a mask. it takes away from the funny a little bit for me. (i mean he makes funny faces and his face is a part of his comedy so i don't feel too bad...)

has eating cereal for breakfast been discussed yet?

I'm not big on Virgil's root beer but then again my favorite is A&W so I might just be tacky. Virgil's cola is aiight iirc.

i like any kind of root beer. not that big on creme soda though. birch beer is kinda my #1.

has eating cereal for breakfast been discussed yet?

― carthago delenda est (mayor jingleberries), Thursday, 5 January 2017 21:41 (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

how is this an example?

yeah wtf?

the rest of the world dines exclusively on croissants/blood sausage in the morning iirc

that was a successful export iirc

not sure grape nuts made it out, though. I love that one but it's mostly for fiber masochists

I just image-googled "grape nuts" in case it was available here under some other name and Google's suggested related searches include "cat vomit" (including a picture of a vomiting cat)

perhaps there is a connection well known to all our American readers, but I laughed

http://imgur.com/a/vxue0

i thought muesli and lingonberries on goat yoghurt was the standard euro breakfast.

grape nuts are great if you pour a half a bottle of honey or maple syrup on top of them. or a pound of sugar. actually, grape nuts on vanilla ice cream with hot butterscotch sauce is really good. true story! try it!

FYI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4O3npHSAXk

apparently I need to eat more breakfast abroad

if your cat eats dry food and later vomits on the floor, it really does look like someone spilled a bowl of grape nuts

the photo of that kickball guy makes me think - zubaz? spent a while wondering why i'd occasionally see american sports bros wearing flamboyantly garish outfits before learning that zubaz were a thing, tho that still didn't really explain them.

I bought some before Christmas, still disgusting (ginger beer >>>>> root beer) but I did enjoy the black cherry cream soda

― a passing spacecadet, Thursday, January 5, 2017 3:57 PM (one hour ago)

ginger ale is much more popular than ginger beer in the US; is it the other way around in the UK? I had (American) ginger beer for the first time last year and I couldn't tolerate it -- it tasted like someone had stirred a tablespoon of grated ginger into a can of ginger ale. but maybe it's an acquired taste and I'm at a disadvantage because I didn't grow up drinking it. I had a similarly adverse reaction to my first taste of Moxie (a regional New England soda that will never catch on outside the US)

ginger beer is delicious but i drink it sparingly

I love ginger beer and drink it all the time either on its own or as a mixer and ginger ale just tastes like watered down shit to me, to the extent I don't even like it, I'd rather have some other soft drink if it's available. It probably is an acquired taste - I've drunk it since I was a kid.

I have eaten Grape Nuts all my life, in England. They are very well established here. Though come to think of it I don't remember ever seeing them in anyone else's house but mine. I once mentioned them in a pop song.

>>> "the inscrutable british mentality surrounding the bbc" <<<

I don't see anything inscrutable. Many of us think that it is extremely good to have a public, non-commercial broadcaster, and will support this ideal, and to a large extent thus will support the real-life actual BBC, even though it does numerous things that annoy or even enrage us.

It is perhaps analogous that eg I still support a national health service even when I am unhappy with the health care I have received, and I have often voted for the Labour Party despite the things it has done that I have not agreed with.

There may be many other people in Britain who have other, different attitudes (including more hostile attitudes) to the BBC - maybe you (j.) were talking about them.

I have eaten Grape Nuts all my life, in England. They are very well established here.

I've never seen them but then I'm not looking for them.

impossible not to imagine the disgruntled grapefox who has been subsisting on pine nuts these long decades

I am impressed at the extremely high percentage of "American culture" that consists of mass-distributed products of large corporations. otoh, the USA has also exported a lot of fundamentalist missionaries who bring with them some very distinctive American religious and cultural ideas, so, if it comes down to a choice of Grape Nuts and snake handling it is easy for me to choose between them.

grape nuts is now americans learned that you could have the name Euell.

https://mrlongisland.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/grape-nuts.jpg

ye were middleman for p. much all of it lads chill out

xxxp i don't mean that, the pinefox, just the attitudes toward specific content, which before the recent decade+ of rejuvenated anglophilia and bbc programming marketshare grabs (glossy world-exportable shows etc) probably always struck american viewers as parochial. say, that i always used to get the impression of something being… meager… about british tv.

americana up the ass right here...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QffEYYotXIk

I have the impression that black cherry occupies the space in the US that blackcurrants do in the UK

i would like to hear that expanded tbh

Do any non-Americans here know who these people are?

no

j -- I don't know so much about what UK TV US viewers watch (can imagine eg SHERLOCK which we here watch but complain about), but can imagine an idea of much old UK TV seeming meagre. Except ... so was much of yours. I think the US had terrible daytime soaps and shopping channels long before we did. The UK also produced what was then seen as high quality TV, be it PLAY FOR TODAY, Dennis Potter, BOYS FROM THE BLACKSTUFF et al.

A thing that was strange but real in the 1980s but is not now is, US TV always had a strange gauzey yellow colour. If not always, then at least with interior sitcoms, DIFFRENT STROKES for instance. That was one way in which US TV was alien and also seemed a bit dubious.

A few US programmes did cut through though with their quality, like MOONLIGHTING.

The problem of the colour difference between US and UK TV went away for some reason, maybe in the 1990s.

Until digital broadcasting came along, Americans used NTSC colour encoding for TV and we used PAL (along with most of Europe/Asia - the French used SECAM which iirc is why the videos we watched in school French lessons appeared in black&white on a PAL VCR/TV):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL#PAL_vs._NTSC

NTSC was hilariously nicknamed "never the same colour" for the reason you mention. It was prone to phase distortions of the analogue signal leading to bad colour encoding and I believe just has a weirder, orangier palette generally. On the other hand PAL colour encoding errors have different problems (grainy? washed out?) which maybe confused American children as much as I was confused by the buzzing oranges and purples of imported American TV.

PS I don't really know about this stuff; these are half-remembered summaries of the grumblings of my Dad, optical physicist and one-time local BBC engineer.

Also, re Camaraderie's post & while I'm being a wikipedia bore, I didn't know until recently that blackcurrants were banned from being grown in the US for a long time and still are in some states, hence not being the common candy/soft drink flavouring that it is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackcurrant#History

I think black grape gets some of the blackcurrant market share - I don't think grape juice (or at least uncarbonated grape juice), grape-flavoured candy etc is as big here as in the States.

you drink beer, eat hot dogs and chat for the first 6 innings then the last inning gets exciting and it's over

― F♯ A♯ (∞), Tuesday, December 27, 2016 6:49 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I went to one baseball game, because an artist I was interviewing was playing the Star Spangled Banner on guitar before the game. I expected to enjoy it as some of the best sports movies have featured baseball, but my god, it lasted for hours and literally no one was paying attention. It was like being in a big open-air bar with expensive and crappy beer and food.

yeah, grape flavour I associated with American-ness even as a kid

NTSC was hilariously nicknamed "never the same colour"

whereas PAL was Picture Always Lousy.

http://static.diffen.com/uploadz/thumb/f/ff/PAL-NTSC.svg/610px-PAL-NTSC.svg.png

the real mystery here is why moroccan-controlled western sahara has adopted NTSC

They haven't.

Apparently the attempt to add a color signal to the existing B&W standard while maintaining forward and reverse compatibility led to NTSC color anomolies. Wikipedia:

Due to limitations of frequency divider circuits at the time the color standard was promulgated, the color subcarrier frequency was constructed as composite frequency assembled from small integers, in this case 5×7×9/(8×11) MHz.[7] The horizontal line rate was reduced to approximately 15,734 lines per second (3.579545×2/455 MHz = 9/572 MHz) from 15,750 lines per second, and the frame rate was reduced to 30/1.001 ≈ 29.970 frames per second (the horizontal line rate divided by 525 lines/frame) from 30 frames per second.

Ah, now I get it!

Also, I just learned that no attempt was made to map standard 24 frame-per-second films to 25 fps PAL broadcasts, so every movie you ever watched on a PAL TV was speeded up by 4%.

xp where's your evidence colonel poo?

Carol Burnett is huge in Western Sahara, like Norman Wisdom was in Albania.

xpost to ogmor, the map you posted!

http://i.imgur.com/X4Bs6hT.png

it's an enclave of green, seemingly the only ntsc country in africa

It's clearly not the same colour, try zooming in

it is pale, but it's closer to green than grey (which would be much less mysterious). nothing sets the imagination off like a bad map

I thought it was No Info, but it doesn't really look the same as that either. Anyway according to this they use SECAM:

http://www.paradiso-design.net/TVsystems_worldwide.html

what format tv would display that map most clearly?

interestingly grits seem to be popular in western sahara and some other bits of africa

i remember reading some article about how there was a way to fix old televisions to optimize color because they were all set to some default factory setting and there were people who would come to your house and fix them! or maybe that was just a dream i had.

i do miss the glow. its weird. the glow of the tubes. you would see that glow from every window walking on the street. now you don't see anything. your eye would fix on that glow when you walked into a room. so hypnotic. probably gave you cancer somehow.

This PAL vs. NTSC thing is revealing. I always thought UK shows looked like that because I was watching them on a crappy PBS channel.

Calling today's date 1/6. There's a map out there for date formats and mm/dd/yyyy is even more isolated to North America than NTSC, I think.

That is hardly ever used even in Canada, definitely not on anything official.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html

That is hardly ever used even in Canada, definitely not on anything official.

I mean, we'd say or write "January 6, 2017" but, when using numeric notation, most official forms use YYYY/MM/DD. At the bank today, they used DD/MM/YYYY tbf. I would assume an American source if I saw the numeric notation of MM/DD/YYYY.

I mostly recall dd/mm/yyyy in vancouver

Yyyy/mm/dd on maybe official govt forms?

Never seen mm/dd/yyyy in canada

Yyyy/mm/dd on maybe official govt forms?

My driver's licence, passport, and health card, and the federal income tax form all use this format.

sounds right

all govt issued

pretty sure my canadian passport and bc care card all do as well

actually i dont remember if my bc care card have a month and date, maybe just year

bc drivers licence must as well im sure (havent looked at it in a while)

has*

Well, yeah, aside from government documents, I usually only have to use numeric notation when banking or signing contracts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

i (american) have learned to always write the date using a three-letter abbreviation rather than two digits so March 4 can't be misread as 3 April. Even within the US the day/month/year format is used in the government and military, and increasingly commonly in routine life though month/day is still far more common.

I only recognize unixtime

hm filed my us naturalization form recently and it was mm/dd/yyyy

It's funny, I miss the 19__ that used to appear on checks, but I don't miss the checks.

Was checking out an ancestor's immigration form and noticed that in all the date fields, the year had been given a head start of 1___. Think of all the time they saved back then!

And the extra printer ink

My credit union was still issuing 19____ blank checks in 1997. I still was using up my supply for years afterward and had to keep crossing out the "19".

I feel like smothering food with melted cheese is an American thing that hasn't really been taken up elsewhere.

dress me up as yankee doodle and gimme a semiautomatic so

drowning things in melted cheese is both one of the most commonly exported american fads and common to every country in many specific ways.

Glasgow is full of takeaway places that will smother p much anything you like in cheese, and deep fry it for you

As a Brit working in London for a US-based company, emails reading "we need this by 4/5 latest" or in-house software tools where you set a security expiry in mm/dd/yyyy format are the... well, not, they're not the bane of my life. I'm used to it now. And it's a media company, so don't get me started on PAL<>NTSC conversion.

"drowning things in melted cheese is both one of the most commonly exported american fads and common to every country in many specific ways."

really? I guess I'm blanking out on examples. is it really a thing in Turkish, Chinese, or Indian cooking, for instance?

even in France, I can think of aligot & truffade, and occasionally a gratin (usually that's just butter iirc). and those are nothing like your average american "baked ziti" with a pound of shredded mozzarella melted atop.

i was gonna qualify and say, at least in europe.

but i bet you still get like attempts at nachos in cities around the world, or grilled cheese or whatever.

last time i was in paris i ordered a veal chop and it said like "with gruyere" and there was an an inch thick slice of cheese wrapped on the top. italy obv goes without saying. in spain you have croquetas, off the top of my head. not so sure about scandinavia but i've definitely had big cheese brick type foods in germany.

i think most food trends exist more commonly than you'd expect too. like the deeper you go into regional cuisines or whatever you'll get like what's essentially a schnitzel sandwich in northern spain, or that sort of thing.

that veal chop sounds like a horror. and we could add cordon blue to that, for France. and the occasional Brie sauce for steak.

BUT STILL, it's not the same quantity of cheese. like obv pizza and lasagna are melted cheese dishes in Italy, but the standard American versions (I'm not talking "artisanal" whatever) are much cheesier.

I was thinking of the sorts of recipes that old American ladies share on Facebook these days (my mother's friends e.g.). or on the applebee's menu. the cheese seems like one of the most distinctively "american" parts of those dishes.

or the Borat cut scene with him walking through the cheese section at a giant American supermarket

yeah i'm maybe not familiar enough with american cuisine at that level but i guess i've seen that sort of thing bleeding out from us food sites or whatever, the idea that loads and loads of cheese is normal or healthy.

the veal chop was actually p nice, it was a bit intense but as a holiday treat with a glass of saint emilion it was quite good.

https://theepexperience.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/francesinha2.jpg

dude, french people eat raclette, i fail to see how "food covered in melted cheese by means of dipping" is that different from "food covered in melted cheese by means of slathering"

i love raclette

i also love raclette

i've seen those recipes Euler's talked about that, shared around on typewritten sheets of paper that look decades old, the amount of cheese they usually call for is insane even by my cheese-addicted standards

is that a francesinha wins?

it's either that or a throw pillow coated in cheese

tesco lasagne with curry sauce

I mean I'd try one obviously, but even by the lax standards of drunk food the francensinha has always seemed pretty terrifying to me

that it is, they are delicious but don't make any other plans if you're having one

Planning a trip to Porto this spring so I'll put aside a day

yeah i had one a few years ago. first half i felt very high, second half very low. good for a hangover though. it feels less unhealthy than a fryup, even if it probably isn't.

tbf raclette is something eaten like once every 2 years, on a ski vacation or something

Unless you live where those ski vacations take place; raclette is a pretty regular dish at my gf's family, as is tartiflette.

Francesinhas I miss more than anything, though you can get some decent ones in Stockwell/Vauxhall. Pretty lolsome for me that: a) they are originally based on the croque monsieur and b) most places still stick them in the "snack" section of the menu, as if they were something to have when you're a bit peckish. Porto love of the dish also extends to making hot dogs the same way.

Number None, if you don't mean cueing the most legendary francesinha can be found at Bufete Fase. For something more casual I always loved Favo, they are hueg.

really?! i think of raclette as something almost impossibly decadent.

Cold winters in the mountains make people more likely to indulge, I think.

you can buy home raclette grills for the price of a bread toaster, they're about as exotic imo

meanwhile, where have francesinhas been all my life?

literally translates to "the little french one", lol

Little french girls
Nagl for brazilians

Or portuguese

best part is when you're prepping yourself to get to work on this insane fucking sandwich that is both smothered in cheese AND swimming in rich tomato sauce and suddenly you remember that it is being served with an enormous fucking bowl of fries

btw smothering things in cheese is great obv but - and this is grim to contemplate but - when Americans talk about smothering things in cheese they are sometimes referring to that ungodly goop that goes by the name "American cheese"

Can we please get back on topic

So last year I went to Canberra on business and tried to find a type of candy they don't have in Australia - btw, this is a hard and dumb idea - the best I could do was Atomic Fire Balls.

With candy, Chick O Sticks would be the first thing I'd think of as here but not there.

man, how has this not become a thing in the u.s.? seems like a natural here.

http://www.ideiasereceitas.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Francesinha-rapida-moda-Porto.jpg

that is like the ultimate drunk/hangover dish. it's so perfect.

raclette is staple food in France

We have the Monte Cristo

it is so awesome, the francesinha. i remember arriving in porto as part of a trip of a few months, i'd been searching for what to do there and that sandwich was prominent in my results. was straight out to get one like an hour after i arrived.

wouldn't american candy be a p good example for this thread? in britain and ireland anyway you don't see a lot of the american candy bars, i don't think. you kind of do a bit more in recent years, like reeces pieces maybe, but generally it's different, i think.

yeah but candy is candy. it doesn't vary that much from place to place. i've had a lot of candy from u.k./japan/etc and it tastes like candy.

though the whole insane salty dutch/danish licorice thang ain't taking off here anytime soon.

American chocolate is famously horrible

i dunno dinsdale, i've eaten it maybe once in 10 years married to a french woman. food bubbles!

xpost yes that's a good one - Hershey's

i just mean that there isn't some extremely american form of candy that would be really foreign to people elsewhere.

dark chocolate way more of a thing in the states then it ever was before. it's everywhere. and it never used to be sold anywhere.

there was just never a long tradition of great chocolate in the states. but we do have a lot of milk.

wins otm - american candy is v diff from even the basic equivalent in the uk, ime.

hersheys is it, exactly. you can now get it some of it here but it still is really unpopular, you never see anyone eating it.

Yeah also if you never taste any better you don't know the difference, but if you're used to half-decent to good chocolate the cheap stuff they have in America is noticeably rough and horrible

Xp

It comes down to molecular chemistry iirc, the crystals formed by the cocoa butter or something along those lines. & your taste buds literally get trained to sense a particular "resolution" of taste

u.k. chocolate bars don't taste that different to me than u.s. chocolate bars. i think i just like them because they are a novelty. but i prefer german/swiss stuff.

most u.s. chocolate based on the nestle/hersey milk formula. and nestle was german, i think. he invented baby formula. he was a wiz with condensed milk.

assume the original Mr Hershey had been in some kind of devastating smell-destroying accident as a child

Unfortunately, that revolting American chocolate is the future. The Americanisation of Cadbury is well underway since they were taken over by Kraft/Mondelez

but yeah i am totally used to the milky flavor of u.s. stuff. i will always love reese's peanut butter cups no matter how much fancy chocolate i have. and at least there is a wide range of fancy stuff out there now. in supermarkets and drug stores.

american cadbury definitely different than u.k. cadbury.

a uk dairy milk is like... p good i guess. it's a diff thing from fancy chocolate but it doesn't, as wins says, have that nasty fake chocolate feeling. to me anyway, maybe some ukers hate cadburys.

this is pretty much #1 cadbury product in the u.s. it's basically the sweetest thing you can ever eat.

http://i2.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article4963022.ece/ALTERNATES/s615/MAIN-Creme-Egg-uproar.jpg

i like Reese's stuff tbf, but the peanut butter does most of the heavy lifting there

at this precise moment i am eating "Monty Bojangles Buttery Salted Popcorn Cocoa Dusted Truffles" and they're pretty great, i assume from the tweeness of the packaging they're a UK thing tho

I mean it's just cheaper to do it the us way

The best exemplar for the difference in taste between different processes in the uk is a magnum ice cream bar vs a supermarket choc ice. Everyone immediately knows what you mean. (US chocolate maybe a step or two below the choc ice)

I went to a lecture about this once so I am an expert

the Creme Egg has actually been one of the major flashpoints in Cadbury's Mondelez era. They stopped making the shell out of Dairy Milk about a year ago to much outrage

most popular in the u.s. are kit kat, 3 musketeers, milky way, baby ruth, butterfinger, hersey's bar, snickers, m&m, almond joy, twix, reese's peanut butter cups.

"I mean it's just cheaper to do it the us way"

you have 300 million hungry candy eaters here. that production line never stops. it's a billion dollar industry.

there is good ice cream now at least. thanks to all the local micro-cream companies everywhere. they do a good job. i remember when it was just breyer's, supermarket brand, hood, haagen daz, ben & jerrys. the dark days.

("little french one" a better translation than "little french girl" imo because tons of words are feminine in Portuguese, sry for digression)

regional ice cream better than regional microbrews in my opinion. american beer mostly sucks even though there are ten thousand small companies churning it out. one goblin cock 12% IPA after another. with a hint of nutmeg and 8 kinds of hops! blecch.

i do love these guys up the road from me though. they are doing the lord's work. tasty stuff. it could ALMOST be from belgium.

http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/food/blogs/99bottles/isaac.jpg

most u.s. chocolate based on the nestle/hersey milk formula.

what I heard was that Nestlé, having invented condensed milk (fresh liquid milk doesn't mix with cocoa right), used it to make milk chocolate, and Hershey was trying to work out how this milk chocolate concept worked and hit upon using sour milk instead

this may not be true but I like to believe it because to me Hershey tastes disgusting enough to involve off milk

inb4 dmac points out that Irish Cadbury tastes diff to UK Cadbury, supposedly creamier

xxp I assumed it might be feminine because e.g. sandwich might be feminine (I do not know if it is) but Google translate for the Portuguese wikipedia page for Francesinha seemed to claim it was so named because the creator declared that "French women are the spiciest" !! :|

in just before dmac and only cos he was busy fyi

i grew up w/hershey's as the standard for how i thought chocolate was supposed to taste, but a little over a year ago i had a "special dark" bar for the first time in years and it was worse than i could ever have imagined

dairy-free chocolate >>>>>

i say this as the guy who started the white chocolate thread

fp

there is good ice cream now at least. thanks to all the local micro-cream companies everywhere. they do a good job. i remember when it was just breyer's, supermarket brand, hood, haagen daz, ben & jerrys. the dark days.

Fun fact: Breyer's -- which used to market itself as only containing milk, cream, sugar, and vanilla (or whatever other natural flavors/ingredients) -- cannot legally call itself "ice cream" in the US:

One result of these cost-cutting practices has been that many of Breyers' products no longer contain enough milk and cream to meet labeling requirements for ice cream, and are now labeled "Frozen Dairy Dessert" in the United States[8] and "Frozen Dessert" in Canada.[9][10]

Wins otm

Goes along with what ive heard and read

Money/profits is destroying the world yo

Goal is now to drive production cost as low as possible without immediately killing us pr at least it not being directly correlated

Then increase product price at the highest people will pay for it

Time to stand up against the man
Down with the establishment
Time to make america great again

things generally improve tbf

But wld u eat a jolly rancher

u askin mr rancher?

What are you a italiano amico

i don't know what a tootsie roll is

hold out your arms, then slightly bend at the elbows

now bend at the knees, and move your right shoulder up and to the right

then the left shoulder up to the left, alternating between the two

you can do little egyptian things with your hands but this is optional and actually pretty regional