Throw Another Shrimp on the Barbie...

American's love Australia, or rather, they love their misconceptions about Australia. I discovered a prime example of this recently:

There is a chain of Australian-themed restaurants in the US called "Outback". The restaurants are decorated with assorted "Aussie" paraphernalia and are excessively cheesy and corny from an Aussie-in-America viewpoint. The adverts are much the same, with a dorky guy proclaiming in an over-the-top Aussie accent how much he loves “Outback”.

Until now, I have always believed that this actor was either an American trying to sound Australian (they are about as successful at this as they are at sounding Russian... that's why we have English actors!), or an Aussie actor hamming it up for his Yankee audience (can't fault that if it gets you employed!). However, I discovered on the weekend that this actor is in fact from New Zealand!! A flaming Kiwi mongrel!!!

Now, an American pretending to be an Aussie for an American audience I can understand, but there's something wrong about a Kiwi doing it (I thought we'd signed some ANZAC treaty against that sort of thing!)... It's even sadder to realize that for the Americans who see the ad, it really doesn't matter...



Okay, now that I've climbed down from my soapbox, I'll finish this post with a quiz question:

In the computer game "Wolfenstein 3D" (generally regarded as having popularized the first-person shooter genre... think "Doom"), a secret level in episode 3 paid homage to which classic arcade game?