>>>Ok, no argument as to the fact that you have to consider which "pile" you are talking about. One note though, you are comparing all of Europe to the US. Last I checked Europe was a continent, not a county. Of course, there is a move toward unification but, I think they still have sovereign countries.
>>>
>>>The reason I choose Europe is (a) becuase it is now, for the sake of comparisons, the EU and hence comparable to the states of the US, and (b) becuase you need to do per capita comparison and the US and EU have roughly 300 million people each. It would be unfair to compare Nobel prize winners of the US to the 14 million people of Holland for example.
>>
>>So are you saying the French, German, Spanish and English are all the same?


Of course they aren't. But is it any different really from saying the many different groups in the U.S. are all the same? Countries of origin, native languages, customs, religions, political viewpoints, and cultural viewpoints all vary wildly, don't they?

Ironically enough, among the articles I read in yesterday's NY Times on the train ride home just now was one about a restaurant owner in Pennsylvania who sounds like a lost brother of you, John K., and Kevin G. I do not say that entirely disapprovingly <g>. The article is labeled as Times Select by the paper, meaning it can only be viewed online by Times subscribers, so I am going to post it here (in violation of many copyright and usage laws, I'm sure). Dan Barry is one of their star columnists and thus in the Times Select category along with Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd, Gretchen Morgensen, David Brooks, Paul Krugman, et al. I was pleasantly surprised to find Barry in that group. He has been filing great columns for years on a relatively unsplashy beat, NYC local news. I don't know how it came about but he was sent to New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of Katrina and filed a series of news stories that comprised the best sustained deadline reporting and writing I have seen in a long time. It was like reading dispatches from Graham Greene. Anyway, enough hosannas about him. Let's turn the stage over to Bill Balsamico, a guy I suspect you're going to like....

Mike

----------------------------------------------------


This Land
He’s Got a Big Sign, and He’s Not Afraid to Use It

By DAN BARRY
Published: February 11, 2007

NORTH VERSAILLES, Pa.

After he has closed his restaurant for the night, downed a few beers at a neighboring bar and eaten a predawn breakfast at Denny’s, Bill Balsamico returns to an unshared apartment beside his darkened establishment and clicks on the television. This is when she visits, his invisible muse.

Somewhere in the early morning, amid the remote-control volleys between Fox and MSNBC and back again, she leans in to inspire, in whispers more profane than profound. She speaks not of love or of loss, but of the Iraq war, gas prices and — here, she hisses — those illegal immigrants.

Soon the explosive words, smack-in-the-gob words, are forming in Mr. Balsamico’s mind. Soon he is selecting six-inch black letters from a storage room shelf. Soon he is hoisting himself, all 6 feet 4 inches and 300 pounds of him, up a ladder to arrange those letters on the white marquee of his restaurant, Casa D’Ice, which rhymes with not so nice.

Who can explain the mysteries of poetry, the pull of polemics — the need of some to proclaim from street corners and mountaintops. All we know is that the Casa D’Ice marquee no longer celebrates spaghetti and salad for $3.99. Now it trumpets Mr. Balsamico’s opinions with ethnic slurs and obscenities not befitting even a barnyard.

“Anytime something aggravates me in the news, I’ll just grab the letters and go out,” he says.

Here is a feeble attempt to convey Mr. Balsamico’s passion while still adhering to the standards of The New York Times:

ONE NATION UNDER GOD

THATS THE WAY IT IS

& THATS THE WAY IT SHOULD BE

IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT

TOUGH (Um, LUCK?)

It is unclear whether these roadside prose poems have whetted appetites along Route 30, a dusty commercial strip looping through this hilly Pittsburgh suburb; whether people have read the bilious comments and suddenly thought: I bet that restaurant serves a mean chicken piccata. No matter. Mr. Balsamico is 61, and he does not care.

The photographs of his marquee messages, which he features on his restaurant’s Web site, have attracted national attention. Nearly 50,000 people have signed up to receive an e-mail message every time he changes the sign.

He has appeared on radio talk shows around the country and begun a lucrative side business of selling merchandise that bears his provocative messages, including mugs and T-shirts, teddy bears and baby bibs.

“There was a big surge for Christmas,” he says.

Which means that out there somewhere, a baby may be wearing a carrot-stained bib emblazoned with:

DEAR MR PRESIDENT

(Uh, URINATE?) ON THE (How about just IRAQIS?)

BRING HOME ALL THE TROOPS

LEAVE BEHIND PLENTY OF BOMBS

THEY WILL KILL THEMSELVES

THATS THEIR WAY OF LIFE

Mr. Balsamico says the “border states” of California, Texas and Arizona drive most of his Internet business, and with a poet’s pride he readily recites the most-requested saying: “This is America. Why must we press 1 to proceed in English?”

Sitting in the interior dusk of the Casa D’Ice, which is closed this evening because of a power failure, he summarizes a life spent in southwestern Pennsylvania. He grew up in a close-knit Italian neighborhood in Pittsburgh — “a ghetto now,” he says — married right out of high school, had three children and held several blue-collar jobs before starting a successful ice business at the edge of the Kmart shopping plaza here.

About a decade ago he divorced his wife — a mistake, he says now — and converted the building into a social club for his buddies; he even installed a boccie court. But acquiring a club license became complicated, so he turned the place into a restaurant, one whose sign never got more provocative than DAILY DRINK SPECIALS.

But the events of Sept. 11 unshackled Mr. Balsamico’s inner polemicist. One day there appeared a marquee message to war protesters: LEAVE THE USA TO FIND OUT HOW GOOD WE HAVE IT, YOU — (This is getting exhausting).

Unleashed, he has since celebrated the death of Johnnie Cochran, mocked Black History Month, invoked Speedy Gonzalez and Charo to rail against the use of Spanish in the United States, complained about rising gas prices and drilled the Bush administration for its handling of the war in Iraq. What he wrote about Donald Rumsfeld would make a war protester squirm.

His muse was whispering to him nightly, though not always with advice on proper spelling. Still, it must be said, his expletives are always spelled correctly.

James Comunale, the North Versailles police chief, says maybe a half-dozen people have complained over the years, all of them parents concerned about the inappropriate language. But, he says, the town’s lawyers have determined that Mr. Balsamico is within his rights to use such expressions.

“All we’ve done is said to him, ‘Give us a break,’ ” the chief says. And, he says, the restaurant owner always complies, often saying he was planning to change the sign anyway.

Mr. Balsamico, the grandson of an Italian immigrant, describes himself as an open-minded man who uses obscenities and ethnic slurs to make his messages memorable. “As far as offending somebody, I really don’t care,” he says. “That’s just the way I am.”

He also clearly enjoys his notoriety. “It’s a good feeling to know that people all over the world know who you are,” he says. “The way I look at it, I’m a nobody: Joe Average Guy.”

Last week Mr. Balsamico declared a kind of détente. Instead of a vehicle for ridicule and vitriol, his marquee became a fluorescent advertisement for his own two-day “birthday bash.” He must have drunk a case of his favorite beer, he says.

The brand: Corona, imported from Mexico.