Only in "America"

A recent (if not the most recent) Newsweek has an interview with the big poobah of Iran (whatever his title is) and he said that he greatly admired the Puritan culture that the US is based on. Interesting, I thought, and perhaps more correct than I'd want to admit.

On another note, I'm officially sick of people being annoyed by people referring to the US as ``America''. Is the name of this country unfortunately non-descriptive? Yes. Can I do anything about it? No. Am I going to go out of my way to avoid offending those in Canada, Mexico, Central America, and South America? Not any more. It's just a pain in the ass. You know what I mean when I say ``America'' or ``American''. Deal with it. (This isn't especially aimed at you, Mark.) If I mean the entirety of those two continents or the people living there, then I'll spell it out, not that I can imagine any context in which that would really come up. (How often does one really end up using the term ``Eurasian''? And those two continents are much more intertwined than North and South America.)

Anyway, you'd think that, these days, all the other countries on these two continents would want to distance themselves from the US as much as possible.