Americans abroad

From "The Victors" by Stephen Ambrose:

The standard story of how the American GI reacted to the foreign people he met during the course of World War II runs like this: He felt the Arabs were despicable lying, stealing, dirty, awful, without a redeeming feature. The Italians were lying, stealing, dirty, wonderful, with many redeeming features, but never to be trusted. The rural French were sullen, slow and ungrateful while the Parisians were rapacious, cunning, indifferent to whether they were cheating Germans or Americans. The British people were brave, resourceful, quaint, reserved, dull. The Dutch were regarded as simply wonderful in every way (but the average GI never was in Holland, only the airborne).

The story ends up thus: Wonder of wonders, the average GI found that the people he liked best, identified most closely with, enjoyed being with, were the Germans. Clean, hard-working, disciplined, educated, middle-class in their tastes and life-styles (many GIs noted that so far as they could tell the only people in the world who regarded a flush toilet and soft white toilet paper as a necessity were the Germans and the Americans), the Germans seemed to many American soldiers "just like us".

Loose end

Ok, so I'm sitting here at three in the morning trying to make an anagram out of INSOMNIA and I'm thinking there's got to be a better way of wasting my time. Apart from blogging, obviously.

Any suggestions gratefully received.

In remembrance

ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Wilfred Owen
1893-1918

Family life

Mac and I are quite strict parents. Of course, the boys didn’t realize how strict we were until they started school and had the opportunity to confer with their peers.

Son: “Hey, Dad, the other kids at school are allowed chocolate cereal for breakfast all the time and not just three times a year like us.”
Me: “What do you mean three times a year? You’re only allowed chocolate cereal twice a year: Christmas and birthdays.”
Son: “No! Remember - Cousin John got you to agree we could have it at Thanksgiving as well.”
Me: “Oh, right. So, three times a year. What’s wrong with that?”
Son: “Well, the other boys….”
Me: “... don’t live in this house. If they did, they’d have chocolate cereal twice a year."
Son: "THREE TIMES!"
Me: "What!? I didn’t know your friends celebrated Thanksgiving."
Son: "They don’t."
Me: "There you go then - it’d be twice a year."
Son: "But… Oh, never mind."

Milestones

Blogging for over four years with more than 200,000 unique visits to the site. No, not me, Zoe Brain.

I must admit, when I first started blogging, I had no idea what was going to happen a few years down the track. If someone had told me 4 years ago, when I started blogging, what was going to happen, I would have wondered what weird parallel Universe they came from. But as I've found out, this one is one of the weirder ones.

Ain't that the truth.