h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Don't you mean "Taxachusetts"? (followed by a boorish guffaw)

We pay taxes of all our income. It's less bureaucratic that way. Some try to avoid paying taxes. The rest of us pay willingly and are even willing to pay more.

In my bank, they keep asking if I want a receipt I reply - no thanks, not until I can afford an accountant, preferably a bent one

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-46892232

New dialect words in Yorkshire? Only if you count the ones that are a thousand years old.

Yeah. And those are ancient Norse

as a kid, I once saw a book of Yorkshire lingo in a shop window I couldn't read half of the book front writingand said to my school mate, I bet we speak most of them everyday

Maybe they're more than Norse -- they're ig-norse!

Might you be familiar with this story, paulh:

http://www.sciencealert.com/a-deadly-wave-of-molasses-once-tore-through-the-town-of-boston?fbclid=IwAR2ItKrfkI4SbbzrGlgI-NpetHf_Hxc4j-ySqwpSGTCDx96dPLKOZBUQqUE

I'm familiar with it, but it was sweet of you to ask,

There is a huge molasses tank quite near my house since the farmers on my twin islands Lolland and Falster almost exclusively grow sugar beets for two of Europes largest sugar refineries. I will keep my eyes open when I pass said tank in the future

I didn't know that sugar beets can be made into molasses.

"Molasses (American English) or black treacle (British English) is a viscous product resulting from refining sugarcane or sugar beets into sugar." [wikipedia]

But of course I found a far better entry on h2g2:

http://h2g2.com/edited_entry/A1073963

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Yorkshire-Dictionary-Dialect-Tradition-Folklore/dp/1858250161

a great read (modest)

A little book of Yorkshire humour?

Knowing Yorkshiremen and -women it can't be that little

I bet the book about Italian War Heroes in the 20th Century is way smaller. It's said to be the thinnest in history. Ever

600,000 Italian soldiers died on the Italian Front in World War I. Their job was to repel the Austrians, 400,000 of whom died trying to invade Italy.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/most-treacherous-battle-world-war-i-italian-mountains-180959076/

Soldiers go into battle not knowing whether they will pay with their lives or not. Were these 600,000 not heroes because they died? That seems like an unfair reckoning of their loss. ;-(

Sure. But not what war glorifying historians usually mean when they speak of war heroes.

If one man holds a bridge against thousands of enemies and in the end giving his own life to that end - now that is a real hero to them!

There would need to be a survivor or two to tell about the heroism. If the survivors include someone with literary ability, maybe there will be a book about it. The gene pool that produced the ancient Roman legionnaires has probably not petered out. It's just that the well-known Italian passions have been directed toward other things than warfare -- music, for instance. Ambitious young Italians have been known to seek their fortunes in other countries. Some found their way to Russia, the post-Columbian New World, etc.

In the First and Second World Wars, Italy started out on one side and then flipped to the other. This made it hard to compile much of a record on either side.

I admire modern Italian culture. You can't beat the food and wine. Families are close-knit -- in many places, schoolchildren go home for lunch, parents make sure that their young-adult children have an apartment or house to live in. They have rules about what kind of coffee to have in the morning versus afternoon. They have had some great engineers, fashion designers, auto designers, film stars & directors. All in all, the salt of the earth (if you like salty earth ).

Having said that, I imagine that young people might justifiably be frustrated about living in a museum.

I agree on most of this, but it's not all museum. A lot of architecture is quite futuristic. Take for instance some of the newer football stadiums.

As for engineering and the like: A huge motorway bridge in Genoa recently collapsed, killing a lot of people both on and under it.

And it took us many years to make just a fraction of the 106 Italian trains we ordered back in 2000 useable. In the end we agreed with the Italians that they should only deliver "skeleton trains" which we then made ready for use ourselves.
The last trains were delivered in 2013 - 7 years late - when the first 13 had already been scrapped. Only 40 trains are in use today, while 37 are held in reserve and 15 have been sold to Romania.
It's arguably the biggest scandal in modern Danish infrastructure.

But you can't beat Italian food. In particular if cooked by an Italian granny