If you think Americans are provincial and ignorant of other cultures, these Amazon.com customer reviews of Planet Earth will do little to change your mind:

David Attenbrough [sic] just doesn't measure up to Sigorney [sic].

I expected Sigourney Weaver's voice and got John Cleese.

My wife and I were entranced by the beautiful music, the soothing voice of Ms. Weaver, and the astonishing videography. What we go was rather different. Mr. Attenboroughs nasal british accent is quite annoying

If only they had gotten someone with a voice that would do the series justice. David Attenbrough's [sic] monotone is not the timbre voice that this series needed

I would have prefered Mrs. Weaver as narritor [sic] But Mr. Attenborough was o.k.

This is the British Version. I can't find the American version, which is narated by Sigourney Weaver, not some British guy, on Amazon. Otherwise I think the content is the same, but Sigourney is better.

Sigh... Sigourney Weaver narrating a BBC nature documentary is about as appropriate as Sir David battling killer space aliens.

Ezra Klein is puzzled by American vacation habits:

Every other advanced economy offers a government guarantee of paid vacation to its workforce. Britain assures its workforce of 20 days of guaranteed, compensated leave. Germany gives 24. And France gives, yes, 30.

We guarantee zero. Absolutely none. That's why one out of 10 full-time American employees, and more than six out of 10 part-time employees, get no vacation. And even among workers with paid vacation benefits, the average number of days enjoyed is a mere 12. In other words, even those of us who are lucky enough to get some vacation typically receive just over a third of what the French are guaranteed.

This is strange. Of all these countries, the United States is, by far, the richest. And you would think that, as our wealth grew and our productivity increased, a certain amount of our resources would go into, well, us. Into leisure. Into time off.

Upcoming Klein columns will no doubt include "How come we have so many people in prison if crime is down", and "Why don't physically fit people stop working out so much and eat some donuts already?"

Aseel al-Omari is a self-described "close friend" of Mohammed Asha, a suspect arrested in connection with last week's failed terrorist attack on Glasgow Airport in Scotland.

The Associated Press reports that al-Omari said the following in defense of her friend:

"He was a good Muslim but never a terrorist or involved in such activities," she added.

Emphasis mine. Apparently, al-Omari thinks it's noteworthy for a good Muslim not to be a terrorist. Hey, she said it, not me.

Via Fark, the BBC reports:

A campaign to cut over-crowding has been launched by frustrated rail commuters in the west of England.

...Simon Carpenter, Frome resident and campaign co-ordinator, said: "The overcrowding of trains is scandalous.

"It is becoming increasingly common place for passengers to be left standing at stations because trains are already at bursting point."

The Fark comments thread on this story is chock full of train-hatin' from commuters who are mad as hell and aren't going to take it any more.

The BBC also reports that this stellar level of train service is now costing commuters even more, with rail fares on the rise across the country.

Via Fark, ANP (Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau) reports that a Japanese trend I blogged about previously appears to have spread to the Netherlands. I love globalization.

I got my recent speeding ticket in part because I simply didn't notice the rather unobtrusive signs on which the speed limit for that particular road was posted.

I feel pretty sure, however, that I would have noticed the limit and slowed down accordingly if only Tokyo's traffic authorities had used the Danish approach. (Warning: mildly NSFW)

Tokyo should adopt this tactic immediately — lives are at stake! (Found via Helmet Hair)

Via Fark, the Evening Standard reports on another Brit who probably wishes he were allowed to carry a gun.

Reuters reports:

A train in Germany was brought to a shuddering halt when a soccer ball flew from a nearby pitch and disabled the locomotive's brakes, police said on Tuesday.

"The ball directly hit the brake pipe between the locomotive and the first wagon and undid it, leading to a loss of pressure," said a spokesman for police in the western city of Muenster. "This caused the train to brake automatically."

This story reflects poorly not only on the durability of Germany's trains, but also on the accuracy of its soccer players.

Liberals like to make fun of the Robert Heinlein saying that "An armed society is a polite society." There are plenty of arms in Iraq, they'll say, and things don't seem too polite over there.

Yeah, well Iraq is in a state of war. London isn't. And if Londoners were allowed to carry any sort of weapons — guns, knives, pepper spray — for their personal defense, I'd bet we'd be seeing a lot less of this sort of thuggery. (Via Instapundit)

FOLLOW-UP:
Here's a disturbing video of another Brit who would have been better off shooting a gun instead of a camera.

The first time I came to Japan was about 16 years ago as a college student, when I did a summer homestay with a Japanese family. The parents were very strict, with zero sense of humor. This was not a cultural-differences thing; as far as I could tell, they simply hated life, and they radiated this sourness to all around them.

I remember being surprised that the mother tried to force me to eat the raw tomatoes in my salad. I despise big, goopy chunks of raw tomato. Yet she demanded I eat them, saying my parents would be proud of me when I got back home.

Crazy, sure. But at least they didn't try to save my soul. Via Digg, Spiegel Online reports:

When Polish student Michael Gromek, 19, went to America on a student exchange, he found himself trapped in a host family of Christian fundamentalists. What followed was a six-month hell of dawn church visits and sex education talks as his new family tried to banish the devil from his soul.

..."When I got out of the plane in Greensboro in the US state of North Carolina, I would never have expected my host family to welcome me at the airport, wielding a Bible, and saying, 'Child, our Lord sent you half-way around the world to bring you to us.' At that moment I just wanted to turn round and run back to the plane.

Things began to go wrong as soon as I arrived in my new home in Winston-Salem, where I was to spend my year abroad. For example, every Monday my host family would gather around the kitchen table to talk about sex. My host parents hadn't had sex for the last 17 years because — so they told me — they were devoting their lives to God. They also wanted to know whether I drank alcohol. I admitted that I liked beer and wine. They told me I had the devil in my heart.

Michael, I feel your pain. Would it really be too much trouble for whoever is running this study-abroad program to screen out would-be host families who see foreign students as nothing more than defenseless targets for their hardcore proselytizing?

Via TokyoTom (who found it linked here), the Telegraph reports:

Most traffic lights should be torn up as they make roads less safe, one of Europe's leading road engineers said yesterday.

Hans Monderman, a traffic planner involved in a Brussels-backed project known as Shared Space, said that taking lights away helped motorists, cyclists and pedestrians to co-exist more happily and safely.

..."It works well because it is dangerous, which is exactly what we want. But it shifts the emphasis away from the Government taking the risk, to the driver being responsible for his or her own risk.

Wow. That's an article tailor-made for this blog if ever I saw one. Thanks, TT. Unfortunately, despite the apparent success of the above program, I doubt the EU will drop its regulate-everything mentality any time soon.

The BBC reports that French forces in Lebanon claim they almost fired on Israeli planes:

French troops serving in Lebanon have been only seconds away from firing on Israeli aircraft, the French defence minister says.

Michele Alliot-Marie told parliament the jets dived towards UN positions in October and were perceived as a threat.

"Two seconds later there would have been a shot against the aircraft which were directly menacing our forces," the defence minister said.

Uh huh. Sure. Whatever you say, Michèle.

I'll go out on a limb here and make a prediction: French forces in Lebanon will never attack Israeli aircraft.

You see, unlike Greenpeace boats, Israeli warplanes fire back.

Cory Doctorow, writing on BoingBoing about a BBC article on Britain's "surveilance society":

Not only are cameras all over Britain — especially London — but many indoor spaces have rules that say you aren't allowed to shield yourself from their gaze, prohibiting motorcycle helmets and even hooded sweatshirts. The hoodie has become a symbol of surveillance-dodging hooligans — a favorite (ab)use of the expansive, extra-judicial "anti-social behaviour orders" (ASBOs) is to order kids to stop wearing camera-foiling hooded jumpers.

George Orwell, 1984:

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Part one of what now, dispiritingly, seems to be turning into a series of posts can be found here. Also, I wrote about Britain's use of ASBO's here.

One of the reasons someone might prefer riding trains to motorcycles is that with a train, you leave all the work of maintaining the vehicle to skilled professionals. Er, most of the time. Via Fark, the BBC reports:

Train passengers were left startled when they were asked if they could fix a fault on their broken down train.

The appeal on the Virgin Trains service from London Euston to Manchester came on Friday afternoon when the Pendolino stopped in Rugby, Warks.

The train had a faulty windscreen wiper and was unable to continue in heavy rain. Travellers were asked if anyone had a cable tie to repair it.

...A Virgin Trains' spokesman said: "After staff consulted with the train manager, it was decided to ask anyone on board if they had a cable tie.

"One person did kindly volunteer but the cable tie was not long enough and unfortunately the train had to be taken out of service."

If only the passengers had performed a thorough pre-ride inspection before boarding, this problem could have been easily avoided.

Via the unpermalinkable Steven Den Beste, LGF commenter jwbaumann is having second thoughts about the wisdom of American military intervention:

Lizard.1: Lizard 2: Lizard 3: Lizard 1: Lizard 2: Lizard 1: Lizard 2: Lizard 3: Lizard 2: Lizard 1: Lizard 2: Lizard 1: Lizard 3: Lizard 1: Lizard 2: Lizard 1: Lizard 2: Lizard 3:

It's terrible. The horrible loss of American soldiers freeing that country from tyranny... ...only to have it devolve into Civil War. Car fires, buses burning, security forces being attacked... ...and the native population seeming to be helpless to stop it. Unemployment sky high... ...no vision for the future... ...a leader at odds with the U.S. No-go zones with anti-government gangs in control. Terrible. We never should have "liberated" them. It was a mistake. And I was so hopeful.. They voted in a constitution... The economy was doing well — exports were increasing... But now, just thousands of dead and wounded Americans. Billions of dollars squandered. And for what? Muslim radical-driven civil war. Yeah. Sad. What a waste. But enough about France. Now what should we do about Iraq?

You can read more about radical Islam's war on France here, here, and here. Those stories are relatively recent, but the same stuff has been going on for over a year. And of course, the French are already starting to surrender.

The Japan Times reports on Muslims in Japan:

...Muslims in Japan, say their leaders, have escaped much of the antipathy and targeting experienced by those in Europe and elsewhere since 2001.

Maybe — just maybe, mind you — that's because Japanese in Japan have escaped much of the Islamic terrorism, riots, and other violence experienced by those in Europe and elsewhere since 2001. Just sayin'.

Via Fark, Reuters reports:

Around a dozen Japanese tourists a year need psychological treatment after visiting Paris as the reality of unfriendly locals and scruffy streets clashes with their expectations, a newspaper reported Sunday.

"A third of patients get better immediately, a third suffer relapses and the rest have psychoses," Yousef Mahmoudia, a psychologist at the Hotel-Dieu hospital, next to Notre Dame cathedral, told the newspaper Journal du Dimanche.

..."Fragile travelers can lose their bearings. When the idea they have of the country meets the reality of what they discover it can provoke a crisis," psychologist Herve Benhamou told the paper.

And that's presumably in the touristy central part of Pairs. Imagine if they had gone into the suburbs (via Instapundit).

Mediafax reports:

An ultra light airplane and a motorcycle raced Sunday on the Cluj-Napoca airport, in central Romania. The ultra light plane (550 de Kilos), made by “Aerostar” Bacau, raced at speed with a motorcycle on the airport in Cluj for 400 meters and the airplane flew at 5 meters from the ground. All the three races were won by the motorcycle, a Suzuki K2 of 1000 cubic centimeters.

Flaviu Varga, 24, the pilot of the motorcycle, said that during the race he passes 250 kilometers per hour. “I was faster than the airplane, I raced on a single tire, I wait for the organizers to bring me a UFO to compete against it,” Varga said at the end of he race.

Does anyone have a UFO handy?

Via Break.com, this video from England shows a driver going way too fast and simply plowing into an unsuspecting biker from behind:


I suppose the rider could have paid more attention to his rear view mirrors. Still, though, in a perfect world, he wouldn't have had to check his mirrors. The minivan driver behind him would have seen a bike up ahead and thought, "Hmm. I don't want to rear-end that bike. I'd better slow down." And indeed, it's tempting to assume the "other guy" on the road will behave rationally and responsibly. Most of the time, he does. Every now and then, though, he doesn't.

At TheTruthAboutCars.com (which is a great site even if it is about cars), Robert Farago has a nice little piece about the unintended negative impact of excessively strict, and excessively enforced, speed limits in England:

The national government has “ring fenced” the money generated by speeding tickets: mandating that local “safety camera partnerships” must spend the revenue from speed enforcement on speed enforcement. This supposedly virtuous circle has led to an explosion of speed cameras, a huge increase in speeding tickets and a very nasty unintended consequence. Just as Prohibition eroded the American public’s respect for law and law enforcement, the United Kingdom’s extremely effective anti-speeding jihad has undermined the public’s respect for the police.

At the risk of alienating road safety-minded readers, many of whom have suffered personal losses from traffic fatalities, the issue of the public’s faith in its police force is far more important than speed-related road safety. When a law criminalizes a behavior practiced by the majority of its citizens, it criminalizes its citizens. When the police rigorously enforce this law, hypocritically enough, the public comes to resent the police.

I believe that speed limits are mostly useless, especially on wide-open highways. People drive (or ride) at a speed that's safe given the road conditions at the time, not because of some law, but because they don't want to die. And the reckless daredevils who blast along at unsafe speeds aren't going to obey the law anyway.