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

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?