I really wonder what kind of tortured logic leads them to say that this "hurts American athletes." The Olympics are in theory a worldwide event, a celebration of human athletic prowess, and it's less than clear how a corporation that didn't pay tens of millions of dollars mentioning the "O-word" (which is thousands of years old) is the slightest bit detrimental to any athlete anywhere. If anything, the fact that McDonald's is a major sponsor of an event that's all about fitness should be shattering irony meters the world over.

Cursive is pretty much obsolete already. When I learned it in elementary school the teachers would say, "When you get to high school your teachers will only accept assignments in cursive." By the time I got to high school no one gave a damn about cursive, and while I was in college professors started requiring most assignments be printed out with a computer. I can see where some people find good cursive appealing for aesthetic and nostalgic reasons (not that I ever knew many people who were good at it), but its practical uses have been vanishingly few for a decade or two already.

I'm too familiar with Japanese stuff to really be fazed by their weird drinks anymore. OTOH, while stuff like Calpis and Pocari Sweat (which is basically citrus Gatorade) are thoroughly everyday there, the really strange stuff does in fact give Japanese pause as well as the rest of us.

@Larfin:

Everyone who thinks the world will end by supernatural means should be made fun of. Apocalyptic fundamentalist Christians are just the most relevant to Americans.

@Kevin:

Um. Yes. What they think about us would be the main determining factor in whether or not they decide to blow us up. Good PR won't fix the whole problem obviously, but it's equally stupid to discard it from the toolbox.