Why oh why do people insist on doing the conger when drunk?

They say that travel broadens the mind and challenges our preconceptions. Normally, I would not even consider reiterating anything that the common herd say, gaping-mouthed, Da-Vinci Code-reading cretins that they are, but in this case there may be some merit in the view. I have just returned from Brazil, where many of my own preconceptions have been challenged. For example, the high-speed ducking and weaving of Sao Paulo traffic has challenged some of my more rigidly held beliefs about volume and mass, not to say mortality. One can see where Ayrton Senna's pedigree was honed. Similarly, I had also held the belief that to aquire the best women a man had to be good-looking, 'sensitive' (whatever that means), moneyed and with at least some prospects. Not so in Brazil, where it's commonplace to see really world-class quim, all firm thighs and pouting breasts, on the arm of a hopeless loser with no cash and only barely above single-celled organisms on the evolutionary scale. John Prescott clearly knows what I'm talking about.

One question has been plaguing my thoughts though - why the hell have the Mediterranean cultures failed to exorcise 'the conger' from their cultural repertoire. We were invited to a banquet in Brazil, followed by 'music and dancing'. Pretty much what I expected, a dark-skinned filly in a slinky dress belting out a couple of renditions of 'The Girl from Ipanema', followed by the old farts of climate science attempting salsa-dancing with their wives. That was until the cultured-but-sensual rhythm was broken by some young buck of a PhD student, from Argentina I believe (I didn't know places like Argentina even had Universities) rushed onto the dance-floor and commenced some monstrous motion that looked like a cross between the conger and the chicken dance. Worse yet, rather than spurning him for the dysmotive imbecile that he clearly was, the S. Americans all joined in! Chileans, Brazilians, Venezuelans - they all ran around the dance floor holding each others arses whooping like the audience of a Jerry Springer show.

It's not only the S. Americans - I've seen similar behaviours adopted by other latin-influenced cultures. The Spanish, the French, even the Italians have been seen performing this classless embarassment. The Saxon cultures don't do it - can you imagine a German performing the chicken dance? They don't do it in Asia either - when a Japanese businessman feels the need to humiliate himself he goes to a karaoke bar and tries to get his drunk secretary to dress up as a schoolgirl. Admittedly, Boris Yeltsin was seen doing something fairly similar, but I think that was an aberration brought on by Chernobyl and vodka. I can't imagine Vladimir Putin doing the chicken dance, he seems more like a tango-man to me.