If 1 in 6 people report themselves to be .015625 German, and 1 in 10 report themselves half Irish, does a tree falling make any sound? And in what accent?

I never heard Polish jokes, growing up. They were always Italian jokes.

You never heard Irish jokes in New England, Cindy? Maybe that's more of a Boston thing.

I'm just glad I hit three of the top four.

I want to know how long you'd consider yourself ethnic. I call myself mongrel white American, because one German here or there three generations back does not an ethnicity make. (The English and Scottish people eight generations back, I think they've expired.)

Here's the thing about ethnicity in the US, though -- my German ancestors came over much more recently than my French ones, but I have much more French-derived culture than German. If I'm any eth, it's French.

If I'm any eth, it's French.

It's American. Will you white people stop drawing lines? You have perfectly good non-white people to differentiate yourselves from.

Thanks for the source, Connie.

Lewiston hasn't been a paper town for a long while, although there used to be quite a few on the Androscoggin River. (Starting at Berlin, NH, which still smells like farts.)

Pretty much every town that is on the 'scoggin smelled like farts for years, especially on a rainy day (Brunswick being one of the towns near the end of the river, and with a paper mill on in in the next town over). I was not surprised to find out that at the height of it's use, it was one of the 10 most polluted rivers in the world. They've done a pretty good job of cleaning it up (pink foam is a thing of the semi-distant past, for instance), but you still couldn't pay me to put any part of my body in it.

It's American. Will you white people stop drawing lines? You have perfectly good non-white people to differentiate yourselves from.

Hmph.

If I have to think of myself as an ethnicity, my true first answer is "Pennsylvanian." If I'm pressed for ancestry, I say "English-German, with some Irish and Dutch". But ethnicity was never a part of my worldview growing up.

Yeah, that's kind of what I meant when I said I'm as American as it gets: One of my grandfathers immigrated from Germany, the other from Ireland. The German married a Choctaw, and the Irish guy married a DAR scion....so of course culturally I grew up strongly Hispanic.

Here, I'm either identified as Irish or Australian.

but she says things like "close the light"

This is how Mal's learning, open and close the light.

Lola, I was writing a blog for a while called "Life in Hellas" about living here, but as it turned out my ability to immerse myself in Greece has been greatly hampered by having a baby. I arrived here at the tail end of the Olympics, so the euro was just getting established - you'd still see prices listed in drachmas, and the older folks were as lost with the coin of the realm as I was. More, actually. I can't compare, but everyone I talk to, Americans and Brits and Greeks, seems to think things have gotten worse. Consumer prices are twice that of any other EU capital, but average income is only 65%.

Some things are getting better, but slowly. In 5 or 10 years things might be on track.