And now for the second only-slightly-used post of the weekend.<\/p>\n
Really, these babies aren’t even used. They were owned by a 96 year-old grandmother who only read them once or twice a month to make sure the allusions weren’t creaky. Here goes:<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been dealing with\/reading comments by non-Americans a lot lately. This is not about Iraq, or Bush, or anything like that. This is about Americans.<\/p>\n
I hear the same arguments from them over and over. I used to hear these arguments from my wife (a non-American, for those who aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t in the know), but either I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve convinced her that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m right, or argued her into knowing not to bring it up anymore.<\/p>\n
To get the effect, you have to imagine a lot of clucking of the tongue and wagging of the head:<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Why do you need 34 kinds of peanut butter\/pasta\/rice\/cereal\/chocolate bar\/etc.? It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s overkill and ridiculous. In fact, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s exactly what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s wrong with America. Americans are such consumers that they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not happy with 3 kinds of cereal like the rest of the world lives with. Who could possibly NEED all this variety? It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s embarrasing and gauche. Just like America.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
And etcetera.<\/p>\n
And, of course, I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand the complaint. Why is it a bad thing that there are lots of choices? You don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t HAVE to buy every kind of granola bar, but you have the choice.<\/p>\n
And what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the deal with worrying about what you NEED? If \u00e2\u20ac\u0153need\u00e2\u20ac\u009d were the only criterion involved, then we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d all live in caves and eat berries and leaves, along with the occasional fish.<\/p>\n
Americans don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t need 24 hour supermarkets, banks that open on weekends, decent service at restaurants, lots of variety in clothes and food, or general convenience. We don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t need it, but we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t see why we shouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have it.<\/p>\n
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll never buy every every kind of orange juice on the market, but I think it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a good thing that Mary can buy Calcium-Enriched No-Pulp Made-from-Concentrate, while Carlos gets his Pasteurized Not-From-Concentrate Medium-Pulp Low-Acid.<\/p>\n
On the surface, I understand why it seems ludicrous. I really do. But when you leave the surface and ask, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s really wrong with it?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the answer is \u00e2\u20ac\u0153nothing.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
The same thing goes for complaints about 24 hour supermarkets or restaurants. The same thing goes for drive-through anything.<\/p>\n
And there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s more. I once had a very heated argument with a Danish guy who thought it was horrible that Americans get their food boxed up to go at a restaurant.<\/p>\n
This is just so crude and unsophisticated. And again, I can see where he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s coming from, but I think that attitude is elitist and wasteful. Yeah, we have bigger servings here (not necessarily a good thing), but we also box \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcem up and take \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcem home.<\/p>\n
He was horrified to learn this new sign of American brutishness.<\/p>\n
Do I seem to be in a bad mood?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
And now for the second only-slightly-used post of the weekend. Really, these babies aren’t even used. They were owned by a 96 year-old grandmother who only read them once or twice a month to make sure the allusions weren’t creaky. Here goes: — I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been dealing with\/reading comments by non-Americans a lot lately. This is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanity","category-miscellany"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}