Happy things thread!

[Travis B.]

Congratulations! Also, could you post pics of the kittens?

[MacAnDàil]

Gléckwënsch!

[Xwtek]

Of all the culinary threads imaginable, the one comparing american and british cuisine is doubtlessly the least interesting.

I don't get it. Why? I mean, if culinary can be very different inside the border. I expected it to even more different between countries. In Indonesian, Padang cuisine and Javanese cuisine is very different. A nation like the US must have even bigger diversity.

[MacAnDàil]

Yeah but Indonesia is basically a recent creation including hundreds of different cultures. The dominant cultures in the UK and the US, if not all cultures (because it is the dominant cultures are usually compared in US v UK comparisons), are very similar.

[doctor shark]

Merci à tous / Thanks!

Congratulations! Also, could you post pics of the kittens?

I can post pics once I get back to the States next week.

[Travis B.]

Yeah but Indonesia is basically a recent creation including hundreds of different cultures. The dominant cultures in the UK and the US, if not all cultures (because it is the dominant cultures are usually compared in US v UK comparisons), are very similar.

In particular, the US has had a rather short post-colonization history, giving little opportunity for internal diversification, and further what diversity was brought by immigrants has in many cases been severely leveled (e.g. aside from Spanish, almost all of the languages brought by immigrants have been lost except amongst first or, in cases, second generation immigrants aside from some cases such as the Pennsylvania Dutch), resulting in a more homogenous present-day culture than someone not from here might expect.

[Moose-tache]

The US has lots of interesting food culture, but nearly all of it is about blending elements that already exist somewhere else (except when it comes to super fancy gastronomy, I guess). So Americans might be hard-pressed to name more than a half dozen "American foods," even though the list would include everything from chop suey to corned beef and cabbage. Whether that's interesting to people depends on what they expect out of food culture. The Brits meanwhile have a much deeper history of local diversification (in addition to the aforementioned cultural blending). Due to the open hostility the locals have for their own food ways, British cuisine is probably the most underrated in the world. Can you imagine a French person on the streets of Paris passing a pie shop that specializes in game bird, a cheesemonger with wheels of Stilton piled in the window, a chippy that serves jellied eels, and a tikka masala restaurant, and thinking "Mon Dieu! Why is French food so tasteless and boring?"

[Raholeun]

Note to self: try jellied eels when in Paris London.

[Ares Land]

I'm sorry, but I have to post this:





Disclaimer: not my actual opinion. French cuisine is way overrated and British cuisine underrated. I think Britain has a weird self-deprecating tendancy when it comes to food.

[Linguoboy]

Yesterday I stopped by the Christkindlmarket [sic] for a quick bite after my oral surgery. As I was chowing down on some potato pancakes, I heard someone at the next table repeating the JFK "jelly donut" urban legend, so I leapt in saying, "That's not what he said. What he said was absolutely correct. That part of the speech was written by a fluent German-speaker." The person responded by saying, "You just killed my buzz."

Happy to do it! More than just my profession, it's a calling really.

[Travis B.]

Yesterday I stopped by the Christkindlmarket [sic] for a quick bite after my oral surgery. As I was chowing down on some potato pancakes, I heard someone at the next table repeating the JFK "jelly donut" urban legend, so I leapt in saying, "That's not what he said. What he said was absolutely correct. That part of the speech was written by a fluent German-speaker." The person responded by saying, "You just killed my buzz."

Happy to do it! More than just my profession, it's a calling really.

I for one learned quite a while that actual real live Germans would not have been confused or bemused by that speech, and that it was perfectly good German for the intended meaning.

What I did hear, and do not know the truth of, that what Kennedy said was actually ick bin ein Berliner, and that the people of Berlin took this as him trying to be like them, as the dialect there uses ick rather than ich. (Note that I used to frequent an IRC channel frequented by many people from Berlin of all places, and they'd often write to each other in some variety that was essentially Middle German with some Low German-isms such as ick thrown in.)

[Ryusenshi]

What I did hear, and do not know the truth of, that what Kennedy said was actually ick bin ein Berliner, and that the people of Berlin took this as him trying to be like them, as the dialect there uses ick rather than ich.

This is false: he had written the phrase pseudo-phonetically as ish bin ein Bearleener, to avoid a pronunciation error.

[Vijay]

The US has lots of interesting food culture, but nearly all of it is about blending elements that already exist somewhere else (except when it comes to super fancy gastronomy, I guess). So Americans might be hard-pressed to name more than a half dozen "American foods," even though the list would include everything from chop suey to corned beef and cabbage.

I have never heard or read anyone actually saying that they ate either of those things, let alone eaten them myself. I'm not even entirely sure what either of them is.

The US has lots of interesting food culture because it has a lot of cultures. But that also means, for example, that what I eat is nothing close to what any of my own neighbors eat.

[Travis B.]

What I did hear, and do not know the truth of, that what Kennedy said was actually ick bin ein Berliner, and that the people of Berlin took this as him trying to be like them, as the dialect there uses ick rather than ich.

This is false: he had written the phrase pseudo-phonetically as ish bin ein Bearleener, to avoid a pronunciation error.

Isn't the "isch" pronunciation actually a West Central German pronunciation?

[Ryusenshi]

Or he simply wasn't able to pronounce [ç] and went with [ʃ] instead; or he asked a German speaker to pronounce it, and noted what he heard, not realizing there was a difference.

[Linguoboy]

So Americans might be hard-pressed to name more than a half dozen "American foods," even though the list would include everything from chop suey to corned beef and cabbage.

I have never heard or read anyone actually saying that they ate either of those things, let alone eaten them myself. I'm not even entirely sure what either of them is.

I ate both of those things growing up.

(When I eventually learned that corned beef and cabbage is an American version of an Irish dish and that the original was made with back bacon, I felt like I'd been cheated.)

Or he simply wasn't able to pronounce [ç] and went with [ʃ] instead; or he asked a German speaker to pronounce it, and noted what he heard, not realizing there was a difference.

He was reportedly not good at all with foreign languages, to the point where they decided not to include any more German in the speech than that, lest he mangle it badly.

[Vijay]

Didn't he also say "Lasst sie nach Berlin kommen!" in the same speech?

[doctor shark]

I was asked for cat pictures, so behold: cat pictures.

More: show

Mona

More: show

Marsha

[Vijay]

Meow!

[Travis B.]

Yay!