in case you've been living under a rock

Even as little as I've been paying attention to the World Cup, I've been bombarded by videos from Europeans who are currently visiting the United States and proclaiming both their love for America and Americans and their shock at the extent to which their own media had been lying to them about the state of the United States—a land supposedly full of mean, violent people, constant gun battles, and war-torn conditions. Instead, what Europeans (outside of US big cities) are discovering is a land of friendly people, clean and safe parks, and—surprise!—great food served in ridiculous quantities.

And can it be? Can it be that even the French have shown the States a little love? Incroyable!

I feel sorry for the Europeans who've been exposed to the uglier, seedier side of American culture. If those people are putting out negative videos, well, those videos aren't popping up in my feed. I don't want to blame the victims, but they should've stayed out of the big cities and visited the smaller towns and 'burbs instead. One thing that makes me chuckle is all the remarks I'm seeing about the "miracle" that is air conditioning. Oh, and the other thing is Europeans finally being convinced that, yes, putting ice in your drinks makes sense during the summer. My French "brother" Dominique wrote to say that it's la canicule (heat wave, from the same Latin root as dog—cf. "dog days of summer") in France right now, with a string of 42ºC (108ºF!!) days in his part of France (Le Vanneau-Irleau). Dom has to worry about his parents, who live down the street, and no one in that neighborhood has air conditioning. What it's like to suffer from that heat, I can't even imagine. Dom also said that, at his second job at a wood-basket company, temps got as high as 70ºC (158ºF), causing fire alarms to go off. But the French will never learn. They will, instead, just learn to do without. And hey, that's character-building, too! Even if a few thousand old and sick people have to die of heatstroke.