quicko: crafty americans

While I know there are a lot of artistic Australians, overall I think the average American is craftier than the average Australian, in the "arts and craft" sense of crafty.  Give an American a pipe cleaner, some rubber bands and an egg carton, and he'll know what to do with them.  Give them to a group of Americans and you've got both a masterpiece and a serious mess on your hands.

Americans like to be creative -- even the "scientific" ones -- in terms of holidays, costumes, parties and general coolness.  Halloween is the obvious example, but it extends far beyond that.  Take the pinata making party I went to last night.

It was an American group meet-up thing and there were roughly a dozen of us gathered in an apartment, all ridiculously hard at work in flour up to our elbows making any number of paper mache objects.  Off the top of my head, we had a piggy, a guitar, a cactus, a Corona bottle (obviously there was a bit of a Mexican theme -- when isn't there for overseas Americans?!), an ant, a fish, a dragon, an eighth note and an unprintable piece of anatomy.

Isn't that cool?  Isn't that creative?  (And I don't mean the unprintable piece of anatomy, by the way.)  Americans just love things like this -- and I have to say we're not too shabby on enthusiasm side of things either.

Anyway, here's some of the fun: