Americans Online

PENSACOLA, Fla. [cwols] - New research has shown that Americans are becoming increasingly infuriated about the abundance of foreign language websites that they now have access to.

"Indifferent and oblivious"
Joan Halliday of UCP (University College Pensacola), who conducted the study, said that 'many Americans say that they are being subjected to matters that they feel have no interest for them.' She added that 'Americans have an extensive history of being indifferent and oblivious to world affairs, and the internet is forcing them to acknowledge the fact that America is not the centre of the universe.'

"Everyone speaks English"
For the survey, 1000 volunteers were each given a questionnaire which they had to fill out, and this produced interesting results. Many participants wanted to know why AltaVista has an option to search in 'any language' - Jon Imbisill exclaimed 'Why do they need that? Like, everyone speaks English, right?', while others murmured in agreement. Many were also startled to discover that there were other currencies apart from the US dollar. Richard Vlijidiot, another participant, demanded 'But how do they pay for stuff?'.

"No one uses them, right?"
99.9% of the participants were convinced that all websites have the suffix '.com', only one questionnee knew that '.net' and '.org' also existed. All were horrified to find that the '.gov', '.edu' and the country top level domain names ('.uk', '.jp', '.ca' etc.) also existed: 'But, like, no one uses them, right?' said Cathy Nobrane.

"Stupid American bitch", "Moody English people"
Most had heard of 'England', but none knew that some words were spelt differently there. One even confessed to sending a friendly email to a webmaster telling him that he had made spelling mistakes all over his website. She kindly informed him that the word 'humour' was actually spelt 'humor' and similarly she had spotted the word 'favourite', and asked him to change these, and other 'spelling errors' immediately. She admitted being confused and hurt when the webmaster replied with an email saying 'Stupid American bitch, why do you assume that you know better than everyone else? Yours is the fiftieth email saying exactly the same thing, always from 'helpful' Americans who think they know best'. She said 'I honestly didn't know there were different ways of spelling things. I was only trying to help.'. She has asked to remain anonymous for fear of being 'hunted down and, like, killed by those, like, moody English people'.

Who runs the internet?
Many had assumed that the Internet was all about America, although this was not surprising - when asked 'Who do you think runs the internet?', all 1000 participants responded, 'America Online'.