Too true sir!  Walmart own Asda - a low grade supermarket here and if I went and hung out in my local one's car park or store you would probably catch some equally horrifying examples of dress sense and 'non-mirror consulting before you left the house' here too.  And our oversized folk in inappropriate clothing are equally as plentiful and grim.

We may speak the same language but with a different accent, but the crimes against food, drink & clothing are the same the world over ....

RaRa

my brother read a book called The Seeds of Albion that explained where different English speaking immigrants had settled across America.  Really interesting in terms of diet, religion, etc.  I have lowland Scottish ancestors, and I believe they might be Tennessee mountain people.  Strange diet and I wish I hadn't shared some of it as a child.

Review

Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

• ALBION'S SEED: FOUR BRITISH FOLKWAYS IN AMERICA by David Hackett Fischer. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, hardbound, 948 pages, illustrations, maps, index, $39.95. ISBN O-19-503794-4.

David Hackett Fischer has performed several notable services in writing Albion's Seed. First, he has brought to American historiography the approach of the French school of the Annales begun by Georges Dumezil and developed further by Fernando Braudel. French social historians have been concerned with both continuity and change over long periods of time. American historians of the 20th century have written history that is almost exclusively concerned with the new.

Second, Fischer has sought to write a total or unified social history rather than a historical fragment. As the author explains in the preface:

Instead of becoming a synthesizing discipline it [U.S. social history] disintegrated into many special fieldsñwomen's history, labor history, environmental history, the history of aging, the history of child abuse, and even gay history -- in which the work became increasingly shrill and polemical. (p. ix).

This book is a comprehensive, almost encyclopedic, guide to the origins of colonial American culture.

...

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v12/v12p114_Rosit.html

Thank god he read it instead of me!

I honestly don't know what to make of this one. Is it true? Is Jim Quinn putting me on? Like a car crash... an article I couldn't look away from.

30 Miserable Lives Lost In Greyhound Bus Crash

Rescue workers were visibly sickened by the number of hamburger wrappers and soda bottles strewn about the bus.

ALBANY, NY—In one of the most merciful disasters in recent years, a Greyhound bus traveling from Rochester to Albany, NY skidded into a ditch Tuesday, killing a dozen deadbeat fathers and penniless addicts, and putting nearly 20 more hapless bastards out of their misery.

Here's the rest of the story

http://www.theburningplatform.com/?p=33651

Accents fascinate me too.  If we ever do get the live video link up in the Speak you will hear that I have a very 'plummy' Queen's English accent with no regional dialect, but that's what a private education does to you ;)

Equally I take calls at the Samaritans from other regions of the country and struggle to understand what the hell they are saying even though they are less than a few hundred miles away & if I get a broad Glaswegian or Northern Irish accent I'm buggered.

Has it's perks though, as well as the Chili's, will be attending this festival as a volunteer which has a stellar line up this year :)

http://www.latitudefestival.co.uk/

Night all

RaRa

Self-sufficient folks are so regular and dependable.  The hats tips are in such a high and tight band at the start of this forum; elsewhere it would be seen as manipulation. 

http://www.tfmetalsreport.com/forum/3291/what-it-takes-be-self-sufficien...

reads like golf scores.  I knew a lot of guys who seemed to shoot a 92.  Me, 123.

Thank You.

Ra Ra -I hope so. Btw, son #4 saw TRHCP couple of weeks ago in front of 1200 people in a special performance of 40 minutes.

Excalibur- yes there's a definite floor and ceiling to those hat tips. I think McGuire should drop a dime to the CFTC. Let them investigate. If that doesn't work the government can set up a new commission with a Hat Tip Czar.

On another topic- Just got a chance to read through Jim Grant's speech in front of the Fed. Good stuff if you haven't read it. I assume it's similar to the RT interview but haven't listened to that one.

http://dailycapitalist.com/2012/04/05/james-grant-vs-the-fed/

It's a little rich, my extolling gold to an institution that sits on 216 million troy ounces of the stuff. Valued at $42.222 per ounce, the hoard in your basement is worth $9.1 billion. Incidentally, the official price was quoted in SDRs, $35 to the ounce—now there's a quixotic choice for you. In 2008, when your in-house publication, "The Key to the Gold Vault," was published, the market value was $194 billion. Today, the market value is $359 billion, which is encouraging only if you personally happen to be long gold bullion. Otherwise, it strikes me as a pretty severe condemnation of modern central banking.

And what would I do if, following the inauguration of Ron Paul, I were sitting in the chairman's office? I would do what I could to begin the normalization of interest rates. I would invite the Wall Street Journal's Jon Hilsenrath to lunch to let him know that the Fed is now well over its deflation phobia and has put aside its Atlas complex. "It's capitalism for us, Jon," I would say. Next I would call President Dudley. "Bill," I would say, pleasantly, "we're not exactly leading from the front in the regulatory drive to reduce the ratio of assets to equity at the big American financial institutions. Do you have to be leveraged 89:1?" Finally, I would redirect the efforts of the brainiacs at the Federal Reserve Board research division. "Ladies and gentlemen," I would say, "enough with 'Bayesian Analysis of Stochastic Volatility Models with Levy Jumps: Application to Risk Analysis.' How much better it would please me if you wrote to the subject, 'Command and Control No More: A Gold Standard for the 21st Century.'" Finally, my pièce de résistance, I would commission, staff and ceremonially open the Fed's first Office of Unintended Consequences.