American English > Queen's English

English food gets a bad rap but its no world beater cuisine either and the classic fry up is probably a poor example of good English food.

Fried eggs, grilled tomato, sausage is quite ubiquitous everywhere and arguably done in better combinations elsewhere.

I like black pudding but do I like it more than morcilla or boudin noir?

Beans I can take it or leave it. Its often canned anyways.

To me, the English are good at enclosing proteins in flour. Fish and chips, beef wellington, English fish pie.

I also prefer Stilton over all other manner of blue cheese.

Out of all the possible street food qualities, ranging from 'sublime' to 'gastroenteritis', London is the only place where I've encountered 'aggressively insipid'.

That's true of most of the street food in London but there are pockets of brilliance that you would probably have missed.

Anyway, moving on from food...

American sports tend to be oversimplified and therefore inherently inferior to the rich and complex sports invented by Brits and enjoyed by hundreds of countries across the world, but I can understand that with a population with the attention span of a goldfish it was necessary to dumb down their entertainment for them and reduce it to bite sized chunks that could be consumed between each round of hot dogs and burgers.

Another area the US totally fails in is mass media. The American mass media ranges from mediocre and shouty to downright terrible, mostly concentrated in the latter. This is why the Guardian and BBC get so many cites from Americans on this forum. It must be bad to have to go to a foreign website to find a good article about your own country, and I sympathise.

jal,

While American sports are obviously lolterrible, I feel your post mostly belongs in the highly regarded Politics subforum of the 2+2 website

Our culture is so great that your citizens, and everyone else's, are wearing our blue jeans and listening to our music. So I think we can safely chalk that one up to a W for USA#1.

*sympathize

I'm hardly a sports fanatic, but legit, calling USA#1 sports built for low attention span is absurd, considering they all predate TV.

Watch a soccer game. If the players weren't all drama queens rolling around on the ground crying out in fake pain to rack up penalties, the games would be at least 3 hours shorter.

How many players outside of soccer are international stars and where are they all from? You never see a Beckham shirt in the USA.

Don't forget about darts and cycling, bro. The nuances make them BRILLIANT.

I'm sure there are. I just don't understand why somebody would go out of their way to make something bland in a food genre where "kinda gross" is perfectly acceptable and easier to achieve.

I read that an average NFL game lasts about 3 hours, and the ball is in play for 11 minutes of that time. Are the fans really paying good money (for tickets and, I assume, overpriced food and drinks) to watch a bunch of concussed muscleheads in tight pants stand around talking to each other for the best part of 3 hours?

No, they're paying to rewatch the parts where players get concussed over and over again on the Jumbotron.

yeah, massive lol at thinking euro sports are better than whats in America. Soccer is unwatchable, the rest of the world should be thankful rugby exists because if we just had to base our perception of you lot based on a bunch of pussies rolling around on the ground acting hurt..... hmmmm, well I guess thats how we view you all anyway. But at least you can argue you arent all a bunch of slack jawed ******s and there are some real men out there somewhere. Too bad you didnt have enough of them back in dubbya dubbya two, then we wouldnt have had to come save all you retreating babies.

cricket is just baseball with a wicket, so thats a wash. What are the other sports the rest of the world watches that are paid no attention to in america? I watch a ton of snooker and cycling, so it can't be those, because they dont reach the level of sophistication and nuance to beat your chest over, please tell me what these sports are, so I can watch them!

Alobar,

I would expect this of the random OOTiot, but from you? You really must be getting old!

Yes, of course soccer is an awful sport. It's an embarrassment to any sports enthusiast to see those idiots sports fellows roll around on the field and try to cheat their way into any possible advantage.

Now, with that out of the way, let's hear you defend baseball or american football. They are truly in the bottom 5 of sports, and way below soccer (which is also a pretty bad sport).

Lol that's a classic

If you're saying it's a bad sport because of the way it's governed and refereed at the highest level, then yes I agree (there's far too much money involved).

Leaving that aside though, there is no better sport than soccer on the planet.

You're Dutch, right?

sumey,

I am not Dutch. I do share dick confidence with a couple Dutch guys on here, though.

If you start giving out yellow cards at the slightest (and I mean slightest) attempt at influencing the referee, I will concede soccer is an ok sport. I think it's pretty clear that's not a very pragmatic way of handling things, though, as it will result in 15+ red cards every game.

As it stands, soccer is an awful sport, no way around it.

Ah sorry my bad, it's Swedish then, in which case my winky face still applies because they were weak as piss in the WC. I mean England dominated them in the QF, which is about as humiliating as it can get.

Re coming down hard on players diving, feigning injury etc I totally agree, and in principle it would be so easy to start applying it. Very frustrating that they won't.

sumey,

That makes literally no sense as a serious reply, but I guess that's mostly appropriate for this thread

Black pudding would have definitely helped that.

But here's American breakfast:



Also American breakfast:



And some more:

Fabian,

Thanks mang , which part?

If I had my way, players would be automatically booked for so much as swearing in the ref's direction. With harsh penalties in force during the match (not lolfines after the match), the game would clean up pretty quickly imo, especially with the introduction of VAR. Why will things almost certainly stay the same though?

Yim, you picked some fairly awful pics for the bottom 2.

El Diablo set up a best breakfast thread similar to the sandwich thread. imo.

sumey,

The part where you say my opinion is negatively colored by us going out in the quarterfinals of the world cup when that is our second best result in the last 60 years (we reached the finals in 1958 and we reached the semifinals in 1994).

The part you edited in after my response, I of course take no issue with.

This. Dear god. This.