Not Another World Cup Post

I've been disappointed by the reaction to Germany's win at the World Cup.  In particular, it's the number of references to the World Wars.  No, I'm not offended by humourously touching on an emotional subject - I like dark humour as much as the next person.  It's just gotten tiresome.

There's only so many ways you can make veiled references to a major war.  It's gotten predictable.  And aren't there plenty of things to make fun of them for?  This is the country that dedicates a month to beer.

The same thing happens with France.  They have only a limited number of joke subjects that are rerun again and again.  They're rude, they like Jerry Lewis, and they surrender quickly in war.  That last one is especially galling, since comics can tell a France-surrendering joke and the audience will laugh, even though no one involved knows why France is associated with surrender.

(Bonus points if you noticed the "galling" pun above.)


There has been humour about Germans being humourless and over-organized, and they've actually seemed refreshing.  Also, Angela Merkel has been the but of some jokes, and really, her awkward-sternness can be pretty funny.  So there is hope for German ridicule.  I'll help out: sausage, Kraftwerk, the Porsche Panamera, reallylongcompoundwords, trying to pronounce "Goethe".

Bringing Micex Back

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about the Moscow stock exchange, and how it's called Micex, which sounds like "my sex."  Well according to the stats from Blogger, it got about ten times the hits a new post normally gets. 

You might thing that's just because it was one of the few posts I've written that prominently features the word, "sex."  But not necessarily.  In the past, the stats have claimed that I get a lot of traffic coming from Russian sites.  So I wondered if it was interest in Micex itself that was driving the popularity.  But when I looked at the breakdown of visitors by country that day, most of them were either from the U.S. or France. 

So my guess is that it really was the references to "sex" that caused the extra visits.  Mentioning sex in a post generates traffic, because people search for sex.  Yep, that's what people use the Internet for, sex.  That's what's on their minds, sex, sex, sex. 

Why it was so specific to those two countries, I don't know.  We always thought of them as being opposites when it comes to their attitude to sex.  But now we've seen France's division over gay marriage, we realize that they share more with the Americans than you'd expect.