good talk

I'm half German and half English. My last name in German means "Prussian" or more exactly, "the Prussian One." My father's parents immigrated seperately around 1900, many of my mother's ancestors immigrated from England, Scotland and Wales around 1650, some came a little later. The Scots and Welsh might not like being lumped in with the English, but the same island, Brittania. 90% of the time when I'm in a foreign country they think I'm English. Four years ago last spring I was walking down the Champs-Elysees when I saw a sign that said "Aeroflot," and I decided to go in and jibe them about their bad safety record. In one of their disasters the pilot put his 10 year old son at the controls and this kid promptly put the plane into a nosedive, due to centrifugal force the pilot and co-pilot couldn't reach the controls and the plane crashed killing everybody. I think one of their planes went down over the past couple weeks, it's not uncommon. I started talking to this Russian girl who was sitting there and she was able to figure out what I was going to say after I had said only a few words. She said, "Oh, he's all upset because France beat England in football." I said, "I'm sure it's a bad thing but..." She said, "Oh, he's feeling out of sorts because the French beat the English at football." I excused myself and left. She hadn't let me get my jibe off, she had broken my jibe. We were just teasing each other, seemed like a pretty good girl.