Miss Prism - you also allow yourself to be rude to Americans or at least me as i find your constant bogus accusations to be very rude. With absolutely no evidence to attack me as only cutting and pasting is downright rude IMO

You have completely lost me.
The only accusation of cut and paste was made by you about Flanner.
I can't remember accusing you of anything, bogus or otherwise.

Like many others, I tend to recognise your headings and avoid them. I suspect that the many intelligent Americans forum members do exactly the same.
Having looked over this thread, I see that I didn't reply to your original topic at all but praised Flanner for his choice of literature.
I lived in the US for a couple of years and still have several American friends. I may be getting forgetful in my old age, but I can't remember insulting any American on this forum.

No, sorry. You've still lost me.
I actually clicked to see my last 50 posts, thinking that I had had a rush of blood to the head or had started pouring out anti-American slogans in my sleep.

The only thread that could be even mildly considered ant-American was one entitled "Clothes That Shriek American Tourist".

My reply was mild in the extreme and actually said that the American tourists I see tend to dress perfectly normally.
As the newspapers say, "This correspondence is now closed" ;-)

Miss Prism - maybe i'm getting old timers disease but do not i recall you saying that i only cut and paste? If not i do apologize and i did not mean to say you were anti-American, just anti this American and that's fine. But if you did charge me with only cutting and pasting with no proof, because there is none, then that would be very very rude IMO. Nuff said. I may spend time searching and see if i can paste and copy the things i at least remember quite well. But as Flimflanneur knows, i could be wrong and then i will apologize.

Some times these threads are like driving with my kids in the back seat bickering, "She looked at me!"; "He looked at me first!"

Are you sure you aren't all lost siblings? :)

Robjame - i know what you are saying and i rather agree with it - the statues can be a novelty but it was just in Covent Garden recently where there were about 12 in a row it became a little over the top for me

and like metro buskers who play for 10 seconds i now find it more like someone doing a job than any artistic merit

But obviously if you find scores of statues, which are proliferating all over Europe, to fulfill a travel need i saw whatever turns you on

I find them more and more tacky and do not care to see several in so many venues.

The only place I saw human statues was in Barcelona. I did like the Grim Reaper statue who would point and then beckon to a passerby.

I must stay that I get a bit lost in some of the squabbles on these posts. I can't recall who said what about whom, and I lose interest.

It's a sort of club. I remember describing somebody as a ten minute egg and the eyes of the person I was talking to lit up.>>>>

It is indeed. Today when talking to some bod about some piffling matter I said that I wouldn't do something as it is "against the code of the Cholmondley-warners". Instant bonding.

How did he get his knighthood if he was a septic then?

Lots of foreigners get Ks (like Weinberger and Ceasescu). And Wodehouse didn't renounce his UK citizenship anyway.

There's a claim that foreigners can't call themselves "Sir": so it was Caspar Weinberger KBE. Bob Hope, it was alleged at the time, had to be Bob Hope KBE, not Sir Whatever Whatever, because he'd taken out US citizenship.

I think The System makes all this nonsense up. Loads of eminient, K-worthy, Britons have had dual citizenship over the centuries, and monarchs have been doling titles out to all kinds of foreign riffraff since the Normans turned up (lots of the KGs in the Garter procession are foreign). Just as The System kept on inventing different claims about whether the Queen should pay taxes, the truth is what we call people is pretty much what we want to call them. It's Sir Bob Geldoff because we all like it that way.

It suited both Plum and the Establishment for him to be called Sir Pelham Wodehouse (should, of course, be Sir Pelham Wodehouse CH, but that's a different story). It suited neither Bob Hope nor the Establishment for him to be called Sir Thingy Watchamacallit.

All complicated by some touchy laws in tetchy countries about not accepting foreign honours.

Suffice to say that the Sir, etc. stuff is all a bunch of total nonsense anyway - silly silly stuff of days long gone

"She looked at me!"; "He looked at me first!"


My favourite was "He's LOOKING at me with his EYES!"

I think that parts of this thread were more like adults trying to have an interesting conversation with a small child jumping around and butting in.
"Look at me!" "This is really clever! You're not looking at me!"

Miss Prism:

I picture someone basically bonhomous, sometimes accused of being mentally negligible....