Ken Brown[SMTP:k.brown@ccs.bbk.ac.uk] wrote:

OK you folks on the downwind side of the Atlantic, now your election is over (even if you won't know the result for 3 weeks yet), can you take your weather back? We've had a month of egregious rain and floods over here and I'm sure it has to be your fault somehow. 5 tornadoes in Sussex (my home county) one of them even killed people. These things just don't happen in England. It must be the Americans fault. Somehow. It wasn't like this in my day... [...] Ken Brown [...]

I once heard a European pundit observe that Americans seem normal most of the time, but every now and then something surfaces to make it clear just how alien they actually are. The example he gave was the American obsession with weather. In Europe, talk about the weather is just conversational padding; noise of no serious consequence to fill an otherwise awkward silences. Americans, on the other hand, MEAN IT when they talk about the weather. They sit up and pay attention when forecasts appear. All US cable systems carry a channel which broadcasts nothing except weather reports, 24x7 - a notion which seems as bizarre to Europeans as would a channel for watching the grass grow. He surmised that this is due to the fact that in the US, unlike Europe, bad weather can kill you. [And even if it doesn't kill you, it can sure as hell play havoc with your day. I've had over 2 feet of snow overnight at my house, while 10 miles away there was just rain. Mark Twain once gave a speech about the New England weather: http://marktwain.about.com/arts/marktwain/library/speeches/bl_weather.htm It's worth a look. ] Peter Trei