it's all this twittering and whittering and texting and socialism.

While I don't necessarily agree with it, I can understand why a lot of people in the US have a limited understanding of world geography... The US is so huge that most people will not be able to see everything in the country in their lifetime, so why bother with what's outside of the country?

I know people (adults even) who have never even found cause to leave their home state let alone travel outside of the country.

One other suggestion may be that the US is very isolated geographically with regards to the rest of the world (You can position a globe with the only land mass on one entire side being the Americas)... Counter that with the fact that Britain is right on the edge of Europe and has a strong tie to a lot of countries around the world (mainly due to the European expansionism of the 18th and 19th century).

It may be suggested that British people have a higher than normal understanding of world geography due to the history of the country, where as the USA, which also spent a lot of its early history politically isolated from the rest of the world, does not have that background.

What bothers me about the American attitude toward geography (and foreign cultures for that matter) is not so much the ignorance ... we are all ignorant until we learn. What irritates me (about some Americans) is the overwhelming need to yap on WITH AUTHORITY about something that they obviously have no working knowledge of whatsoever.

In other words its a valid academic study but puts America in a bad light.

Well we have that as well....but it's mainly confined to retired coppers.

Well there is that isn't there.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,

I was talking to one of my employees today about the desire of moving back to Oregon (from New York), his answer was 'at least it's closer to the UK.....'




.....yeah if you ignore the Pacific, Asia, Russia and the rest of Europe!

think of it as "the scenic route."

Maybe he thinks the planes can only fly one direction around the globe.

New York! What do you expect!
Hurry up, before Oregon closes for good.

I don't know the answer to this, but is the flight over the pole, shorter than the "round the landfalls" flight across the Atlantic.

I shouldn't have laughed.. my first trip over to Greece was last minute & the 'best' flight I found was PDX-->LAX-->London, talk about all around and about!
LA to London was 13 hours direct. I wasn't pleased to see we were practically retracing PDX-->LAX just to get started.

I had a good one myself a few years back... My flight from Rochester, NY to Manchester, UK went as follows:

ROC -> BOS -> TOR -> MAN

Yep, I went from Rochester to Toronto via BOSTON... I literally flew over Rochester airport on the second leg of the flight. The reason for it, as I recall, was no direct flight from ROC to TOR at that time and the train schedule not working out for my flights.

weatherwise, possibly?

She Shoots! She SCORES!!!!!! Nice move!