On Sat, 2025-10-18 at 13:53 -0600, ben via cctalk wrote: > On 2025-10-18 1:34 p.m., Van Snyder via cctalk wrote: > > > In European hell the French are the engineers, the English are the > > cooks, the Germans are the police, the Italians are the bankers, > > and > > the Swiss are the liovers. > > > The Eiffel tower and Fish n Chips and Statue of Liberty disprove > that > theory.
When I was preparing for my first meeting in Oxford, a colleague who had worked at the UK Met Office in Redding told me "Eat in pubs; the food is much better than in hotels or restaurants." He was right. I enjoy Fish 'n Chips with mooshy peas and vinegar, and Shepherd's Pie … and of course good English Ale served at the proper cellar temperature of 54°F. …. Ferdinand de Lesseps's failure to build a Panama canal, and the Citroen (and Peugeot), and the Maginot line. On the other side of the ledger are Louis Pasteur, dozens of outstanding 18th and 19th century French mathematicians (Laplace, Legendre, Lagrange — who was born Italian, Poisson, Fermat, Poincaré…), the Millau Viaduct, French nuclear power reactors, and spent fuel processing. > Ben.
