I'm absolutely sure that Lois has heard of kilometres, and she probably even has a rough idea of the ratio between kilometres and miles. But it's exactly as Kae suggests: she's grumpy and not inclined to cut this weird country any slack at all - or perhaps, not inclined to let Clark have an easy life right at the moment.
Well, I have to admit that wasn't at all the impression I got. Yes, she's clearly grumpy, but she also seems to have no idea what she is talking about. Maybe I didn't get it because it seems so out of character for Lois to pretend she doesn't know something. To pretend to know something she doesn't, yes. But I've never seen her play stupid. So I was confused because if Lois spent somewhere between three months and year in Ireland, she'd certainly be familiar with KM. Besides, every American I know understands about the metric system. We might not all know the conversion rate, but we'd never go to Europe and and be surprised to see the speed limit posted in KM. So, I admit, my first reaction was to see this as a dig at Americans. And that impression was reinforced when I got to Clark's paragraph-long rant about what a weird country this is, including citing examples of obscure laws most Americans have never heard of and certainly would support repealing matched with a dig at our former president and our drinking age.
We'd all like to do away with stereotypes - hence this challenge. I know this is supposed to be humorous, but honestly I didn't get much farther in the story to find the humor, because I was too offended to read past the slew of American stereotypes at the beginning. Americans are no more ignorant, intolerant jerks than the Irish are supersticious druids. I'm sure this was meant as a joke, but I thought you should know that not all of your readers found the humor in it.
