Funny Stuff – Page 16 – Splendid Isolation

So let’s exchange the shouts for a few giggles.

And now, some stuff to help you open your eyes on this Monday morning:

By the way: next week’s Funnies’ theme will be “All About The Color Red”. Try to contain your excitement.

Here’s the third in our series (Part 1 for the explanation and then Part 2 continues the theme), and some fine stuff it is, too. These ones are still modest — you won’t see any little gardens growing down below; but they’re still gorgeous.

Enjoy.

I can earnestly recommend Lord HardThrasher’s series on the Allied bombing campaign in WWII Europe. (He sounds exactly like Mr. Free Market would sound, if Mr. FM could be arsed to do a show about the military.)

He spares nobody, and I mean nobody. (Ignore the occasional anti-Trump digs; he’s just swinging his saber indiscriminately.) He is, of course, especially scornful of the Nazis.

Greatest Living English Historian? I report, you decide.

As any fule kno, I yield to no man for the love of my adopted country. I am an American by choice, and doubleplusproud I am to be that.

However: there are three things peculiar to the U.S. that got up my nose soon after I arrived here, and they have continued to bug the hell out of me ever since.

1) Date format: I know that we can do pretty much anything we want because Murka, but FFS why do we insist on mm/dd/yy (or /yyyy ever since Y2K) when the rest of the world uses dd/mm/yyyy? It makes no sense, forces one to insert an unnecessary comma when writing out the date — e.g. November 19 COMMA 2024, to prevent numbers running into each other — when going with the universal format would just make things easier. For everybody.

2) Gallons: I have no problem with using Imperial weights and measures, because they make things easier for everyday life over the artificial metric system. But why the hell do we have a liquid gallon that is smaller than the Imperial gallon? I was looking at a lovely old car’s specs the other day, and saw that it had a “tiny” 15-gallon fuel tank — and then realized that it was a Jaguar, and they were quoting Imperial gallons (in this case 18 U.S. gallons). I mean, we don’t have a mile that’s shorter than an Imperial mile — we could just go metric for that, don’t get me started — so why a use a smaller gallon measure?

3) Floor numbers: When you step into an elevator / lift in any developed country outside the U.S., you see the selector thus:

…but in the U.S., it’s:

Why no ground floor? Once again, it’s something we do that nobody else does, and it often leads to confusion when talking to a non-Murkin. FFS, every building has a floor that’s at ground-level, so why not use the “G” and say “ground floor”?

No doubt there are all sorts of sound reasons why we Murkins have gone our own way — and don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely no problem with that mindset, e.g.: