An ashtray anecdote from the ’70s, complete with national stereotypes: I knew a guy employed in a research lab at Yale who went to a conference in Paris and had two days off to do a little sightseeing. He decided to take a train across the French border into Germany. The ashtrays on French trains in those days took both hands to operate; you had to hold up the lid of the contraption with one hand and flick the ash into the tray with the other. A German engineer traveling in the same compartment watched my acquaintance struggle with the thing and commented, “Typisch französisch.”