[extropy-chat] Blog spam

[J. Andrew Rogers]

On 9/28/05 11:09 PM, "Alejandro Dubrovsky" <alito at organicrobot.com> wrote:
> Still no idea
> about Rayner.


It is a much beloved and long lost commercial reference.

The part that is probably throwing you is that spike wrote it out like it
sounded as most people were exposed to it, not as it was actually spelled.
Hence the Google problem.


One of the problems with this is that it exposes the extent to which the US
is very much a collection of different cultures and economies (i.e. States).
It is difficult to come up with things that are both universally
recognizable to all Americans *and* not recognizable by foreigners who have
been immersed in Americana.  There are a lot of immensely popular regional
phenomena that other Americans in different regions of the country would not
recognize.  The troubling #8 is an example of this.

To give some examples, very few Americans who have never lived in the Great
Plains know what a "runza" is, but in some parts of the country it is more
popular than McDonalds as fast food (it was damn near a dietary staple when
I lived in Nebraska).  Most Americans have never heard of the hideous and
unforgettable critter known as a Mormon Cricket, yet they are pervasive in
many parts of the Mountain West of the US.  Having lived some time in many
different regions of the US, I've come to appreciate that there is at least
as much variance in cultural context within the United States as there is in
all the European countries.

It is easy to think of the United States as one country, but it is really an
amalgam of 50 different countries with widely varying cultures, histories,
and local conditions.

Cheers,

J. Andrew Rogers