First off, if I repeat anything here apologies, I read about 10 pages then got tired and decided to just go ahead and post
With regards to the Stig's American cousin, his name is Steve Shelton. His brother Wes is my team-mate in an F1 BATracer game (his cousin Tom plays in it too). They're a bunch of amatuer racers, you can check out their
website. Apparantly Steve is real short and the TG crew gave him an oversized Stig outfit, so he looked worse then Jacques Villenueve
. Oh, and someone mentioned something about him being stuffed with pillows, yes, that's true.
About the episode itself, wouldn't say it was my favourite, not by a mile, but it was a superb episode non the less, fantastic.
Getting down to the nitty gritty, and the whole Alabama/redneck thing. Some people here have been suggesting that people anywhere can be offended so easily. True, but the thing which had me concerned is that they got upset over issues which really didn't warrant any sort of violence, no matter what opinion you hold. I mean, if someone in Britain drove around in a car which said
Cameron for PM (the opposition leader, for our non-Brit friends),
anywhere in the UK, no one would give a crap. If someone drove around saying F1/Football/Cricket sucks, no one would give a crap. If someone drove around saying man love is good, people certainly wouldn't give a crap here, in fact they'd probably laugh in most places.
Mind you, I think this is a bit of a superficial point, because I'm not entirely convinced by that whole scene. A lot of things in TG these days are scripted, which I don't mind in the least (in fact I enjoy them), but for me the jury's out on whether they were attacked by rednecks and why James and Richard were still bothering to jump start the car, or what happened to them after the cameras stopped, or what happened to the rednecks that gave chase, or........ ..
You get the point.
About New Orleans, fair enough perhaps some people there are being ungrateful (and the people JC and RH donated their cars to didn't look entirely grateful to be fair, but then perhaps that's understandable considering there wasn't much to be grateful about :lol: ). But remember after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, some Afghans were not very pleased at the handouts given to them by aid agencies (winter was approaching and they were frustrated at the lack of appropriate winter clothes/tents). Is that reason enough to abandom them and let them fend for themselves? No, the aid effort continued and still continues as it should. At the very least, forget the individual handouts, I would have expected much of the mess that is littering the streets to be cleaned up by now. I'll hold my hands up and say I am by no means an expert on issues affecting individual states in America, but if this really is the fault of incompetence on part of the local government, isn't this a bit of a crisis and thus why the nationwide authorities need to step in and help sort out the mess asap? Just my thought (for whatever it's worth).
And finally, about the TG Jessica theme and Bart Simpson, I personally loathe the Simpsons, but I've found the clip on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyTzxgni9Tg
p.s. I think I might be right in saying this is a new record for the longest TG specific episode discussion. 1000+ and counting!