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

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