InhaleDeep
Bluelighter
How much about the geography & history of Europe do they actually teach at American high-schools?
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- Thread starter Tommyboy
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RecklessWOT
Bluelight Crew
Idk, I mean we spent a decent amount of time learning about European history in my school. Not anywhere near as much as you learn over there I'm sure, but as far as I remember my entire 10th grade history class was European. Stuff was happening over there far before this place even existed, so if they wanted to teach us anything before the 1700's it obviously had to be about Europe...
Johnny blue
Bluelight Crew
Same here. We did have American history classes but, there were other classes that just focused on time periods and would encompass the history of various places whether it be Egyptian, Chinese, UK or where ever. There were also European History classes.yah in high school we had a world history class which was a mix of greek, roman, Egyptian and northern european history. We also had to take a semester of geography in high school, although that was basically like here is Ireland on a map. type thing. At university tho I have been able to take solid geography and European history and modern affairs classes. But that could have something to do with the fact that i am a history/ political science major interested in international relations and multinational governments like the EU, UN, Arab league.
O and BTW one of you English fuckers need to answer my ?'s there just a few posts up but it seems as tho they have been ignored. I wanna them answered dammit!
felix
Bluelight Crew
"this area here above Africa is Europe. we went over there and won World War 2 for them back in the olden days, then we saved their tea-drinking asses from Communism a few decades later."
the history & geography i got at school (in scotland) was shit. we were taught about things like stone age corpses being dug up, and crop rotation. nothing about where countries are on the map, or how the 13 Colonies were stolen by terrorists. thank fuck for wikipedia. :D
brutus
Bluelight Crew
^ We had to memorize the location and correctly spell every country and major body of water in high school geography.
Then again, I also had a forestry class where we went on a field trip to a prescribed burning. A lot of the rednecks thought it would be a good idea to run around with the drip torches and ended up encircling the entire class in a ring of fire. It still puzzles me how the redneck pyromaniacs thought it would be funny to circle everyone, including themselves, in fire.
Cornishman
Bluelighter
Why do Americans call flies a zipper?
eg: 'oh hey, your zipper is undone'
Johnny blue
Bluelight Crew
The 3 strikes thing is a tool that LE uses to deter career criminals such as gang members. Not too sure how effective it is though. The drug laws are pretty steep although it's getting better. In my state, possession of up to an ounce of MJ is now just a ticketable offense and not and actual crime. Many states are adopting marijuana decrim and they just changed the insanely strict crack cocaine laws which will positively affect something like 10000 people currently locked up.
RecklessWOT
Bluelight Crew
Yeah, I used to have a forest watch class in HS and once a week we would take "field trips" into the woods. The two rules were "please do not destroy nature, yes that includes don't knock over dead trees" and "this is not an excuse to get high. Please no smoking". It was always a great time to do one of two things, break both rules, or sneak away and go home early.
Because a fly is just one type of zipper. Personally I never call a fly a zipper, I just call it a fly, but it is technically a zipper. It's not like it's velcro or something... same thing as the zipper that zips your coat up, it's just a smaller zipper that happens to be down there.
Yes, the police and laws here are highly oppressive and I take huge offense to it. That is one of the main reasons for my acute paranoia and anxiety and often times a major reason I break laws in the first place. (Obviously not the whole reason but man that shit's fucked.) The 3 strikes thing is mainly down south and out west. That's basically set up to get career criminals off the streets from my understanding, but I'm sure that many reasonable people accidentally get caught up in the whole thing and have the rest of their liveable lives stolen from them on some stupid fucking technicality. That's as good of a reason to go out in a hail of gunfire as any as far as I'm concerned... Turning good yet slightly misguided people into hopeless lifers... Just when we're running out of room in our jails, go ahead and sentence a whole bunch of people to life in prison, good plan. Fuck that. I hate this country's judicial system.
RecklessWOT
Bluelight Crew
Also, I spent Thanksgiving with an English dude. One of my cousins brought one of his teammates over because he is English and has never celebrated Thanksgiving before. He was pretty cool. So apparently I learned the difference between England, Brittan, and the UK. I knew the UK was a few different countries, but I honestly thought Brittan was just some stupid fancy other name for England, I never knew other countries were involved. Also, I honestly never knew wales was its own country, I always thought it was a region of England... I feel so smart now... lol
The Rock Monster
Bluelighter
Also, I spent Thanksgiving with an English dude. One of my cousins brought one of his teammates over because he is English and has never celebrated Thanksgiving before. He was pretty cool. So apparently I learned the difference between England, Brittan, and the UK. I knew the UK was a few different countries, but I honestly thought Brittan was just some stupid fancy other name for England, I never knew other countries were involved. Also, I honestly never knew wales was its own country, I always thought it was a region of England... I feel so smart now... lol
now you are enlightened!
dan88
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Aug 25, 2011
- Messages
- 875
Yeah American tv shows are pretty popular, usually your bigger dramas get shown. In the UK we have what's called Freeview tv, which has about 25 channels and is free so long as you pay your tv license, then we have cable companies like Sky or Virgin which you pay for, and that usually has quite a lot of American tv, along with things like sports channels, music channels, movies channels etc.
Hmm I don't really know about cars, I live with my parents, and me and both my parents have a car, whilst my brother (who's just passed his test) doesn't. Insurance for my brother though is stupid. He was going to buy a little 1 litre Corsa, but the cheapest insurance he could get was £2,600 (around $4000) for the year. On my car the cheapest he could get was £17,000 (no bullshit!!), and thats a Mini Cooper S, not a Ferrari or anything. I'd say though people in London have fewer cars than anywhere else, as its just a pain driving in London plus you get charged a congestion charge when you go into the centre. Your just better off on the pauper wagons.
On the subject of cars, whats the opinion on American cars in America? Here, they are seen as bad at handling, is that the case in America?
Sports, football is easily the most popular, with cricket and rugby being the second favourites. Cricket is traditionally seen as an upper class sport, although this has changed over the past 20 years or so. Now when you go to cricket matches people sing football songs etc (which pisses off the middle and upper class toffs). Rugby Union is generally played in the south of england whilst Rugby League is played in the north (and is 10x as good.... not that I'm biased or anything). Other popular sports I'd say are F1, boxing, athletics etc
I like to buy American because it is usually cheap to fix. Also, they are the only cars that I am used to working on since my family has always had them. As far as handling, they still do seem a bit boxy, and I've never really like their brakes, but I can't say that I've driven a foreign car and been that blown away by it. The Jetta VR6 was alright, but the dashboard and whole view while driving is weird in them. It had decent speed, but I mostly liked that it didn't feel like the engine had to try that hard to go fast. The corvette has awesome handling, and is always compared to foreign sports cars, and is usual equal to them in everything but the interior appearance.
As for sports, I take it you meant what us Americans refer to as 'Soccer' when you were naming the most popular sport. Here it is probably American Football, with Baseball up there with it. Baseball may be losing in some popularity, but it is still America's pastime.
muvolution
Bluelight Crew
I would buy american now as they are drastically improved over even a decade ago. That said, I don't know of any American car I could have bought for under 8k, will get me to 60 in 5 seconds, and that I can rock pororsches with on track days.
RecklessWOT
Bluelight Crew
American cars typically don't handle well (although some do, the Corvette is an amazing machine). Even the sports cars (untill recently) are really made for brute acceleration and power with little concern to pesky things like handling and braking. Lots of V8's in older cars and V6's. Only recently have 4 cylinders become popular (which blows.) Honestly, as much as I would love to say I'm all American, Honestly about 16 of my cars have probably been Japanese, with only 5 or 6 American cars. There's actually a whole lot of Japanese cars here that's mostly what you see on the road tbh. I've only owned one european car (Volvo) and man did that thing suck. European cars are so hard to work on and highly overengineered to the point where it becomes crippling (the company I work for specializes in Euro car parts, so it's not like I'm just hating on Europe...). American cars were awesome back in the day, and then during the mid 80's-early 00's they really were trash all around. They've come back a long way recently though, they're improving greatly.
I myself pay about $2000 a year in insurance and I only have the most basic of insurance, the legal minimum I am required to have in this state (only covers $10k of the other driver's expenses if I cause an accident that is my fault and I'm left to pay for the remainder and my own damages entirely out of pocket. It would be more if I lived in a city, but I live in a rural area so I save some. I also have no coverage if my car is stolen or against acts of nature like if it's burned or flooded or a tree falls on it etc), it's largely based on what your driving record is like and how risky your car is deemed to be.
Baseball is big here especially in the northeast, football is big here too (although I am not a fan) and soccer (what you call football in europe) isn't really big at all but is gaininig popularity as of late. World cup years definitely are more popular, but still not huge.I was in florida for 2 weeks in september and have to say everyone was really happy, TOO happy, not that i'm saying that being happy is bad but it just seems like an act, is it a normal thing for the majority of americans to put on a happy face all the time? some people just looked plain fake, but anyone i talked to were really nice people so It changed my views on americans, before i went i had a lot worse image in my mind of americans haha...just stereotypes i guess.
The only thing that was strange for me was staff forcing us to tip pretty much because they knew we were tourists, writing on the bill how much we had to pay, EXACTLY, the majority of us know we have to leave a tip but when you shove it in our faces sometimes we will be less inclined to do so..^ No, we don't all act happy like that. People from NYC are notorious for being rude, and most won't even look at you. When you venture out to the country though, most people are very friendly and a lot more hospitable.
As for the tipping, most restaurants will include gratuity on the bill if you are with a party of a certain amount of people or more. I want to say it is if you are with 6 people or more, but I am not sure, and it may vary from place to place.
