BTW I have been to Paris and Ms. Schiffren seems to have been quite unimaginative in her choices of venue. Personally I avoided Parisian restaurants for the most part, since they seemed inordinately expensive and rather tourist-trappy. Alternatively, there was a wonderful fresh-air market that set up shop every morning outside my hotel, where one could have one’s pick of fresh fruits and veggies, cheeses, bakery items, meats and anything else the heart desired. ( Not to mention the free Continental breakfast I got at the hotel.) P.S> I had an AWESOME time in Paris. All that claptrap about how “the French hate Americans” is just more right wing b.s. If you make even a rudimentary attempt to speak their language they are unfailingly courteous and helpful.

It wasn’t because of Blue Laws, which would have prevented the shops from selling much of anything, but didn’t prohibit restaurants from serving food and drink.

When my family moved to Missouri in ‘64, the supermarkets all had cloth panels that pulled down over the shelves with stuff like kitchenware or stationery on Sundays. Stores were only allowed to sell food and drink, no sundries or miscellaneous stuff. But restaurants could even sell booze on Sunday as long as food sales made up the majority of their business.

Nah, I’d say the reason all the restaurants were closed was probably because most of the locals are church-goers who want Sunday off for religious purposes. In a place like Kansas City or Saint Louis, it’s easier to find non-Christians willing to work on the Sabbath. In Branson, not so much.

Oh yes, likewise. The LP guides also tend to be good about local etiquette so that you can avoid making an ass of yourself, as well as the regional tricks that get played on gullible tourists – all knowledge the wingnuts would be better off to have, but stodgily won’t bother with.

Popular in many parts of Germany are Pommes rot-weiss, i.e., with ketchup and mayonnaise.

Interestingly, the same is true in Utah, but we don’t give them some faggy Euro multi-culti like that.

And then

Bloomberg was re-elected mayor in November 2005 by a margin of 20%, the widest margin ever for a Republican mayor of New York.

Those are re-election numbers. That’s the rate of “yes please, more of this shitbag.”

Please to be explaining with the Bloomberg and Guiliani.

Simple: Queens; Staten Island; the southeastern part of Brooklyn.

Please to be explaining with the Bloomberg and Guiliani.

The French in Paris were universally nice to me. Of course, I at least tried to speak French (by which they were greatly amused) and ate croque-monsiuer instead of demanding hamburgers.

I love Parisians. All the ones I met were nice people. But then, I love New Yorkers too, so…

It’s just that, like New Yorkers, Parisians have little tolerance for idiots.

Here in The Netherlands, the choice extends past mayonnaise and ketchup to curry sauce, a strange spicy ketchup, oorlog (a sweet barbecue sauce) to my personal favorite, sate sauce. You havn’t eaten “patat’s” until you’ve dipped them into a thick sate sauce that you could use for mortar in other circumstances.

Is that part of a shit-moat’s drainage system?

I haven’t used the Metro, but I’ve rode the RER (commuter) trains there and they were very clean.

The rise of the Religious Right does a lot to explain the shift. Now Republicans try to pander to a poorer, less educated demographic. British aristocrats have been pretending to be French since they were French, and American snobs have typically copied the Brits. The old apologia for wealth was aristocratic: the better sort of people had been bred to lead for hundreds of generations.

A more effective way of getting poor people to vote for you, however, is to promise them money and flatter their preconceptions. Now rich people are rich because God has blessed them, which means that anyone who has enough faith and votes for tax cuts can be rich too.

Ironically, you still see wingnuts call swearing and wearing slutty clothes “low class.” They think of class as a behavior, still largely molded according to Victorian standards. They don’t realize that A) the point was always to differentiate poor from rich, not to accept well-behaved poor people, and B) the values of the elites have evolved since then.

Fuck you.

The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge said,
July 3, 2009 at 6:11 · Edit

So speaking of road rage, I’ve always heard that it’s worth your life to be caught driving in France with white headlights (instead of French yellow) because they’ll think you’re a German and run you off the road. Is that an urban legend?

Yellow headlights stopped being put on new French cars in 1993-94, so you rarely, if ever, see them in France anymore. The running off the road stuff is almost certainly an urban legend and one that I’ve never heard. It’s probably related to the supposed origin of the yellow headlights which were introduced in the late 30s allegedly to differentiate the French from the hoardes of invading Huns.