• 97 Posts
  • 1.74K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 30th, 2023

help-circle




  • This comes up a lot these days, but it’s pretty standard in Canada and the USA to call the USA “America”. It’s not just a Trump thing, or even just an American (from the USA) thing.

    In Canada we would never say we are in America. We would say we’re in North America, and maybe “The Americas”. But saying we’re in America would sound to us like you’re saying we’re part of the USA. And absolutely, without a doubt, we would not call ourselves “American”. That is 100% reserved for people from the USA.

    So I understand where the rest of the world hears the word “America” being thrown around by, well, Americans for lack of a better term (USAers?) and thinks it’s weird, but in this context, saying Canada is in America is actually kind of insulting to us Canadians.

    It’s particularly weird when speaking Spanish, where saying someone is Americano is often used for anyone from the Americas. But at least they have “estadounidense” (basically “united statesian” which I’ve never heard anyone say in English). But they also use “norteamericano” (North American) specifically for people from the USA. Ugh.




  • Sorry if I over explain anything obvious…

    “Whistling Dixie” is a local American term generally meaning not being serious all the way to over-hoping for a good outcome. As in, “If you think the president is going to apologize, you’re whistling Dixie.”

    The term refers to the song Dixie which was basically the anthem for the South/Confederacy in the US Civil War. It’s a very catchy tune and can be danced to or marched to because of its meter.

    In the comic, the outnumbered soldiers who are hiding are southern confederates, with a northern Union regiment marching on their position. This probably wouldn’t be a good time for the losers hiding in the ditch to give away their position by whistling their anthem. But man, it is a catchy tune and that regiment really is drumming a beat.

    The actual term “whistling Dixie” probably came much later than the civil war, because it was referring to the southerners’ dreams of winning being crushed, but that’s classic Far Side juxtaposition.

    I think that’s probably enough explanation for the comic, but for background:
    The song itself was written for American minstrel shows, which heavily used blackface and were often used to push and popularize racist stereotypes about African Americans. The song is basically about a free former slave pining to be back on the plantation, and is pretty much saying that’s where black people belong.

    You can find some examples of alternative lyrics in other comments, some of which may even come from civil war times and the North turning the song around on the southerners.









  • I agree that it seems impossible for a truck to be stuck like that. But you can’t see if there are some steel rods jutting through appropriate places or something else weird going on to keep it there. Think about floating shelves, tensegrity tables, or those street performers sitting/levitating in an “impossible” seat, for example.

    You can’t necessarily “see” physics in a still frame picture. There are millions of examples of things that look impossible, but you’re just seeing them from the wrong angle, and there’s some hidden thing going on.

    That edge of the building is an immediate and completely apparent error in whatever work was done to generate the image.