Modern McDonald's Math For Mental Midgets

Lou Minatti does the math for someone who can't:

Sarah's parents are 100% European. Sarah is ready to vomit because she hates America so much and wants to move to the UK.

I bet you get insulted from a lot of people for saying that Americans are stupid, but let's be honest! The truth is your right!!! Americans are pretty stupid. Especially our fabulous leader Bush.....God......he's got as much common sense as a five year old. I sometimes ashamed to be an American....because I know what the rest of the world thinks of us. My parents are 100% European. They were born and raised in Britain. What country are you from? I'm moving to the UK soon. Good, because if I see another McDonald's sign I'm going to throw up......You're right about American tourists. You can definitely whose a tourist from America. I go to the UK every summer to visit my grandparens

Unfortunately for Sarah, there are at least 1,200 McDonald's restaurants in the UK. So let's do the math.

• The UK is 244,820 sq km in size. With 1,200 McDonald's restaurants, there is one McDonald's restaurant per 204 sq km.
• The US is 9,631,418 sq km in size. With 13,000 McDonald's restaurants, there is one McDonald's restaurant per 741 sq km.

So the McDonald's Density Ratio (MDR) in the UK is far higher than in the US. This means that Sarah is much more likely to spot a McDonald's in Old Blighty and vomit than if she stays in the US.

Now, "Old Blighty" is not an acceptable characterization of the country where my ancestors were burned at the stake for asserting freedom of conscience, and it must be pointed out that Sarah, having been born here, is at least as American as Howard Dean; but other than that, Lou is a certifiable genius. Read the rest of the article for links and more analysis of similar stupidity.

While we are on the topic of McDonald's, I would like to point out that I consider their food to be a health risk. This is a company that needed to do research to figure out that "taste" was considered an important factor relevant to food buying decisions. That said, and as every other red-blooded American male with a four-year old grandson in their life will confess, I am occasionally forced to eat there. The little rascal really likes McDonald's Playland. This argument cannot be made for the success of McDonald's in France, where we know that beleaguered grandparents take their second generation offspring to the Louvre instead. Given the success of MacDonald's in Europe must be due to European consumption, I find it somewhat confusing that Europeans would consider it to be emblematic of America. I don't even know anyone personally who likes MacDonald's. Somehow it just doesn't fit into "Mom, baseball and apple pie". I do, however, understand the response of the author of The Night I Became An American. (Hat tip to relapsed catholic.)

Suddenly I realized that to my young Austrian companion, it made no difference whether I knew Bruckner's symphonies backwards and forwards; it mattered not in the slightest that I could appreciate the poetry of Grillparzer in the original German. I was an American, and, therefore, I had to be the kind of person who, when in a strange land, would make a bee-line to the closest McDonald's, out of fear of tasting the food of foreigners.

Would you respond as he did?