AWESOME, DUDE

Read a funny blog journal posting by a young Irish world traveler who liked the United States in many ways while he was here, but was totally turned off by other aspects.

While I would disagree with his assessment of Americans as not "honest" enough ( he likes what he considers the honesty of Germans, say, who will tell you in no uncertain terms if they think you are too fat or are not smelling good--"Americans are too polite--too politically correct to tell you things like that," he says...)

But he is certainly right on with his dismay of American cliche words and phrases, and particularly a society in which it seems everybody and everything is "Awesome!"

I recently saw some pictures of the flight deck of the Endeavour space craft which were something way beyond what we usually see and were , for once, really awesome....