Saturday, January 14, 2006

Global diversification and other drunken ramblings

We went out for postgrad drinks on Wednesday night and a visiting American student joined us. He was on his way to PNG to do some fieldwork and had stopped here to visit someone in our dept who is one of the top experts on PNG languages. The weird thing? This American guy turned out to be an undergrad. What sort of undergrad goes halfway across the world to collect data for a project?

Of course, sitting at the pub with a bunch of smart, drunk people, you always learn something new. What I learned this week: America does not have canned spaghetti (count yourselves lucky). And New Zealanders are the only ones who use it as a replacement for the tomato layer on pizzas.

2 Comments:

Perfesser Slaughter said...

Ummm...we yanks pretty much invented canned spaghetti. And Pop Tarts. And pizza, though some attribuite that to a 4th century Mongol overlord.

Never would have dreamed of what...using it as the tomato layer on pizza? Hmmm...you don't do the nutty British thing with baked beans on toast, do you?

StyleyGeek said...

I always thought that too. So, maybe this American guy was only _pretending_ to be an American guy. Or maybe he comes from the American equivalent of Tokoroa.

And yes, the baked beans on toast thing rocks.