On the "funny language" border.
We kind of owe you a few lines about the "funny language" mentioned as a crucial trait of the folks in our post "Hillbillies R us".
In some of the smaller towns around here, time has passed very slowly, leaving largely intact very old language patterns.
As a native speaker of English listening in on the locals, you might pick up some words and wonder if your ears are playing a trick on you.
If it sounds like "(h)our", chances are it really is the unit of time of "sixty minutes" on that wall clock. And when a farmer talks about "mice" in the barn or "lice" on the dog, you can nod in sympathy (standard German for these is "Mäuse" and "Läuse") as he is describing two common pests.
In one place you can hear "dat" (indeed, this and that), whereas a mile over, they say "das" -- as seen in the VW car commercial "Das Auto".
These language patterns, dialects unless you live in Luxemburg (where they insist it is a language in its own right), indicate some of the changes that make modern German sound the way it does today. In some instances, a change remained inexplicably "incomplete". As if the people living in the 8th or so century had decided to apply the change to one syllable in a word and then decided to stop, thus creating a meandering linguistic boundary of "partially changed" words.
This post is not a forum for detailed linguistic discourse (please read as: we are lazy), but we do want to give you one example of this using the word "pepper".
In order to be standard German, all the instances of "p" in Pepper will need to display a shift of the "p" to "pf" at the beginning of the word and "f" inside the word.
In English, it is "pepper", in Dutch "peper", in modern German it is "Pfeffer", and then somewhere in the hills around here, you can find "peffer". The normal shift of the "p"s in the middle of the word happened, but the shift at the beginning (from p to pf) never did.
Maybe we should not be surprised about the persistence of "incomplete" shifts. Despite the changing ethnic makeup of the population, despite modern education homogenizing language, the old lines are still there -- like the foundations of the Roman villa in the woods.
Saturday, March 9, 2013
"For eternity"
We must deal with Death! Not ours, of course. Such began yet another discussion at the K-landnews when one contributor noted we had not done a post on Death.
There were the passing references, and you can include dead horses and pig anatomy lessons there, but nothing dedicated to Death.
Here's to Death then.
This very strange end of a life, the true extent of which we arrogant human bastards until recently proclaimed to be reserved for our superior brains to understand.
Turns out that other smart mammals seem to understand it pretty well, too.
What else can we say about Death?
A lot, if we judge it by the fact that major religions have spent so much time and effort on constructing explanations and on charting the future of believers and non believers after the event.
Used to be that Death was also called the great equalizer, but we realize this may never have been true. We generally manage to not dwell on those who cling to life so much that they have themselves or parts of the selves deep frozen in anticipation of the times when humans will, finally, manage to become as good at creating life as they have been at destroying it.
And then they reported that Hugo Chavez is going to be embalmed and put into a museum.
They apparently said "for eternity". Leave it to the secular Western media to put "for eternity" in quotes.
This would have been a great opportunity for the Vatican to step in and demand removal of the quotes.
We at the K-landnews are already getting bored with Death after a couple hundred words. Does that make us bad people? Isn't our short life better spent by giving a euro to the street musician whose tunes brighten up a drab Northern European spring day?
In the background, our local PBS station is airing a piece about the Wizard of Oz.
It's easy to get distracted.
There were the passing references, and you can include dead horses and pig anatomy lessons there, but nothing dedicated to Death.
Here's to Death then.
This very strange end of a life, the true extent of which we arrogant human bastards until recently proclaimed to be reserved for our superior brains to understand.
Turns out that other smart mammals seem to understand it pretty well, too.
What else can we say about Death?
A lot, if we judge it by the fact that major religions have spent so much time and effort on constructing explanations and on charting the future of believers and non believers after the event.
Used to be that Death was also called the great equalizer, but we realize this may never have been true. We generally manage to not dwell on those who cling to life so much that they have themselves or parts of the selves deep frozen in anticipation of the times when humans will, finally, manage to become as good at creating life as they have been at destroying it.
And then they reported that Hugo Chavez is going to be embalmed and put into a museum.
They apparently said "for eternity". Leave it to the secular Western media to put "for eternity" in quotes.
This would have been a great opportunity for the Vatican to step in and demand removal of the quotes.
We at the K-landnews are already getting bored with Death after a couple hundred words. Does that make us bad people? Isn't our short life better spent by giving a euro to the street musician whose tunes brighten up a drab Northern European spring day?
In the background, our local PBS station is airing a piece about the Wizard of Oz.
It's easy to get distracted.
Friday, March 8, 2013
Fear and loathing in the digital world
Is German fear of failure holding them back in all things internet?
Just as we finally decided to pounce on the quality of web searches in German, the digital age commentator of Der Spiegel online declares that manifold failures in the German internet realm are basically caused by a "German fear of failure".
Continuous innovation, the willingness to make mistakes, a culture of learning, overcoming the German aversion towards "Learning by doing"-- all of these are said by the author of the epistle to be what this country needs to live up to the promises and riches of the internet.
The K-landnews team's decades of computing and internet experience do support some of these arguments some of the time.
It is telling that the article written in German contains the phrase "Learning by doing" in English.
Yet, we disagree with these premises.
Yes, they do strange things, for instance in online banking. They made you buy a separate device that generates a pin. The government job center folks make you wait at least a week after signing up before they send you a PIN in the mail.
We believe that Germans tend to focus on products in an unhealthy way: make a product, and people will buy it. So, technical innovation by itself doesn't do it. Neither Facebook nor Oracle, or many others, were very innovative -- but they did compete successfully against established players.
The culture we like to see as group oriented and consensus focused at the same time heralds the individual craftsman, making it hard to find a plumber or an electrician willing to listen and adapt.
All in all, scolding the Germans as fearful and risk averse doesn't cut it in my opinion.
Entrenched groups and structures simply have an easy life around here. One hundred years ago, this place was a monarchy with famously tight hierarchies, and the remnants are there for all to see.
Just as we finally decided to pounce on the quality of web searches in German, the digital age commentator of Der Spiegel online declares that manifold failures in the German internet realm are basically caused by a "German fear of failure".
Continuous innovation, the willingness to make mistakes, a culture of learning, overcoming the German aversion towards "Learning by doing"-- all of these are said by the author of the epistle to be what this country needs to live up to the promises and riches of the internet.
The K-landnews team's decades of computing and internet experience do support some of these arguments some of the time.
It is telling that the article written in German contains the phrase "Learning by doing" in English.
Yet, we disagree with these premises.
Yes, they do strange things, for instance in online banking. They made you buy a separate device that generates a pin. The government job center folks make you wait at least a week after signing up before they send you a PIN in the mail.
We believe that Germans tend to focus on products in an unhealthy way: make a product, and people will buy it. So, technical innovation by itself doesn't do it. Neither Facebook nor Oracle, or many others, were very innovative -- but they did compete successfully against established players.
The culture we like to see as group oriented and consensus focused at the same time heralds the individual craftsman, making it hard to find a plumber or an electrician willing to listen and adapt.
All in all, scolding the Germans as fearful and risk averse doesn't cut it in my opinion.
Entrenched groups and structures simply have an easy life around here. One hundred years ago, this place was a monarchy with famously tight hierarchies, and the remnants are there for all to see.
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
More Nazi news
You have heard about the latest figures of nazi internment camps, topping 40 000 and counting. It has been widely reported in the American media and, of course, in Germany.
What you may not have heard about are a couple of books that irrefutably dismiss one of post World War II Germany's most beloved myth.
The myth that the regular army stayed "clean", that all the atrocities that formed the holocaust the the war were committed by the select SS, Gestapo and a few other well-defined nazi organisations.
Based on British and American interrogation records and surveillance of prisoners of war, the book Soldiers from 2011 and the book Kameraden from 2012 bring to the general public what many experts had known all along.
Pretty darn awful.
This being said, our resident military history expert and military museum guide had this to say: Hearing it from the simple soldiers is an important confirmation of things we have known for a while. To me, the reception of these books was a lot more telling than their research. There continues to be a vocal minority of Germans who will acknowledge the facts but immediately turn around and point at British and French colonialism, Soviet brutality, or American aggression, or simply any war past and present for their "it was not only us", or "these guys were even worse" stance.
What you may not have heard about are a couple of books that irrefutably dismiss one of post World War II Germany's most beloved myth.
The myth that the regular army stayed "clean", that all the atrocities that formed the holocaust the the war were committed by the select SS, Gestapo and a few other well-defined nazi organisations.
Based on British and American interrogation records and surveillance of prisoners of war, the book Soldiers from 2011 and the book Kameraden from 2012 bring to the general public what many experts had known all along.
Pretty darn awful.
This being said, our resident military history expert and military museum guide had this to say: Hearing it from the simple soldiers is an important confirmation of things we have known for a while. To me, the reception of these books was a lot more telling than their research. There continues to be a vocal minority of Germans who will acknowledge the facts but immediately turn around and point at British and French colonialism, Soviet brutality, or American aggression, or simply any war past and present for their "it was not only us", or "these guys were even worse" stance.
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
German web searches suck
From our We-are-sure-about-this Department.
We have touched on odd internet rules in Germany issue in a couple of earlier posts, for example Internet Connection More Dangerous Than Gun.
And just this week, the German parliament passed a law aimed at forcing search engines to pay for search preview content unless they show "very short snippets of no more than a few words". Many experts call this sad, or crazy, we call it "job enrichment for lawyers".
But this post is about something altogether different, it is about "the use and usability" of the German language portion of the Internet.
The whole thing is quite strange because the basic premises and facts all point to the German internet being as pervasive and as good as you'd expect from one of the world's four or five largest economies.
We looked at figures, at expert articles, at international rankings, and found that all was pretty much alright, and yet, something felt very wrong about our daily user experience.
Previous posts of the K-Landnews contain ample examples for our attitude towards premature conclusions: usually, when we see one, we jump.
But our definitive answer to the strangeness of the German web was slow to emerge, and we gave ourselves time to reduce, if not eliminate, the language barrier aspect. If you don't speak French, good luck searching the web in French. Same for German.
We gave it a few years and now we can claim: German web searches tend to suck.
The point is: a huge number of searches conducted in German will give you so much irrelevant crap, so many ad farms, so many aggregators, so many cookie cutter shell sites that the good stuff if much harder to find than for searches in English.
Yes, the German web portion has everything, from news sites to gardening, from shareware to shopping galore, from dating to porn, from pet care to pediatrics but good results are hard to get.
We did account for some language specifics, for example, the mind boggling use of compound nouns as well as for the wider gap between government speak and general language usage, or technical terms versus generic language.
Still, even simple one word searches bring up as much trash as the Pacific garbage patch. You, the little internet bird, run the danger of choking on useless bits of degraded data.
The one browser feature that has saved us: bookmarks. We use them much more for German web sites than for English ones.
Along the lines of the undervalued famous disclaimer "past performance is no guarantee of future success", we can now claim that the country that brought you the printing press has yet to deal with its digital mess.
[Update 11/2015] Search engine companies continue to tweak their handling of German (and hundreds of other languages), and we have seen small improvements. But the headline is still very much true.
The law "ancillary copyright", as use of this unspecified amount of text is called, has worked out great: the big search engine companies asked publishers to agree to a waiver or face delisting and lose the substantial traffic generated by the news listings.
The big publishers gave in and focused their extortion efforts on small aggregators as well as renewed political efforts at the EU level.
Money for nothing is just too tempting.
We have touched on odd internet rules in Germany issue in a couple of earlier posts, for example Internet Connection More Dangerous Than Gun.
And just this week, the German parliament passed a law aimed at forcing search engines to pay for search preview content unless they show "very short snippets of no more than a few words". Many experts call this sad, or crazy, we call it "job enrichment for lawyers".
But this post is about something altogether different, it is about "the use and usability" of the German language portion of the Internet.
The whole thing is quite strange because the basic premises and facts all point to the German internet being as pervasive and as good as you'd expect from one of the world's four or five largest economies.
We looked at figures, at expert articles, at international rankings, and found that all was pretty much alright, and yet, something felt very wrong about our daily user experience.
Previous posts of the K-Landnews contain ample examples for our attitude towards premature conclusions: usually, when we see one, we jump.
But our definitive answer to the strangeness of the German web was slow to emerge, and we gave ourselves time to reduce, if not eliminate, the language barrier aspect. If you don't speak French, good luck searching the web in French. Same for German.
We gave it a few years and now we can claim: German web searches tend to suck.
The point is: a huge number of searches conducted in German will give you so much irrelevant crap, so many ad farms, so many aggregators, so many cookie cutter shell sites that the good stuff if much harder to find than for searches in English.
Yes, the German web portion has everything, from news sites to gardening, from shareware to shopping galore, from dating to porn, from pet care to pediatrics but good results are hard to get.
We did account for some language specifics, for example, the mind boggling use of compound nouns as well as for the wider gap between government speak and general language usage, or technical terms versus generic language.
Still, even simple one word searches bring up as much trash as the Pacific garbage patch. You, the little internet bird, run the danger of choking on useless bits of degraded data.
The one browser feature that has saved us: bookmarks. We use them much more for German web sites than for English ones.
Along the lines of the undervalued famous disclaimer "past performance is no guarantee of future success", we can now claim that the country that brought you the printing press has yet to deal with its digital mess.
[Update 11/2015] Search engine companies continue to tweak their handling of German (and hundreds of other languages), and we have seen small improvements. But the headline is still very much true.
The law "ancillary copyright", as use of this unspecified amount of text is called, has worked out great: the big search engine companies asked publishers to agree to a waiver or face delisting and lose the substantial traffic generated by the news listings.
The big publishers gave in and focused their extortion efforts on small aggregators as well as renewed political efforts at the EU level.
Money for nothing is just too tempting.
It's not raining meatballs
How to force a connection between the horsemeat in IKEA meatballs and the weather.
Done.
We are celebrating the first two days of real sunshine in 2013.
This German winter was just given the dubious distinction of "darkest winter in 43 years", and we really felt it.
No meat crisis, no government blunders, no egregious events could prevent a longer than normal hibernation of the mammals in this household.
The critters were so sleepy and sad that we started to grow kitty grass indoor instead of venturing out every morning to dig up some grass in the backyard much like the buffalo in Yellowstone at this time of the year.
Meteorologists are saying the spell of gorgeous weather won't last, but we are unfazed. All window sills are occupied by cats following the sun.
Yardwork never felt so good. Despite the fact that we must have had the same feeling last year when the warm ball in the sky came out again. Not remembering can be a good thing.
For now, none of the craziness and stupidity around us can penetrate the warm, yellow glow.
Done.
We are celebrating the first two days of real sunshine in 2013.
This German winter was just given the dubious distinction of "darkest winter in 43 years", and we really felt it.
No meat crisis, no government blunders, no egregious events could prevent a longer than normal hibernation of the mammals in this household.
The critters were so sleepy and sad that we started to grow kitty grass indoor instead of venturing out every morning to dig up some grass in the backyard much like the buffalo in Yellowstone at this time of the year.
Meteorologists are saying the spell of gorgeous weather won't last, but we are unfazed. All window sills are occupied by cats following the sun.
Yardwork never felt so good. Despite the fact that we must have had the same feeling last year when the warm ball in the sky came out again. Not remembering can be a good thing.
For now, none of the craziness and stupidity around us can penetrate the warm, yellow glow.
Monday, March 4, 2013
Commies at Harvard Law
Taking another break from horsemeat.
We had such a good belly laugh reading about the Harvard Law School is full of communists speech by some senator.
The quaint 1950s retro thinking is so adorable, and we should have seen it coming when fedoras and hats started to become fashionable again.
We cannot help but wonder about law school, why do people go there in the first place? There is anecdotal evidence of the allure of old fashioned language, but that may be made nil and void by other motives, such as the desire to contribute to justice.
A friend of the K-landnews will never forget one law student's complaint around six months before graduation: We started out as cool people who wanted to further justice, and now, most of us have become self-serving egomaniacs. I feel like dropping out, that's how disgusted I am.
Reason was made available to the friend: You are so close to done, why not finish it off, get that degree. Even if you will never work as a lawyer, the degree is yours, you worked hard for it.
There was another good reason, but we did not think of it at the time.
If you buy something valuable or big, stating that you have a law degree is good for your customer service experience. Journalists and lawyers used to be the two top ranking professions for the complaint departments of the large consumer companies. You'd get better treatment right out of the gates.
The friend of a friend did finish law school. However, he does not brandish the title and bringing up the subject of communists in US law schools will get you a laugh and a "ah, come on".
We had such a good belly laugh reading about the Harvard Law School is full of communists speech by some senator.
The quaint 1950s retro thinking is so adorable, and we should have seen it coming when fedoras and hats started to become fashionable again.
We cannot help but wonder about law school, why do people go there in the first place? There is anecdotal evidence of the allure of old fashioned language, but that may be made nil and void by other motives, such as the desire to contribute to justice.
A friend of the K-landnews will never forget one law student's complaint around six months before graduation: We started out as cool people who wanted to further justice, and now, most of us have become self-serving egomaniacs. I feel like dropping out, that's how disgusted I am.
Reason was made available to the friend: You are so close to done, why not finish it off, get that degree. Even if you will never work as a lawyer, the degree is yours, you worked hard for it.
There was another good reason, but we did not think of it at the time.
If you buy something valuable or big, stating that you have a law degree is good for your customer service experience. Journalists and lawyers used to be the two top ranking professions for the complaint departments of the large consumer companies. You'd get better treatment right out of the gates.
The friend of a friend did finish law school. However, he does not brandish the title and bringing up the subject of communists in US law schools will get you a laugh and a "ah, come on".
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Yahoo VPN log slingers
NASA engineers send remote controlled spacecraft into the black interstellar space.
Yahoo engineers are unable to program the code behind a "submit" button on a web page remotely -- or so you can interpret what was said by the leaders during the first couple of days of the great work from home dust up.
Faced with blowback against their non-arguments of greater speed and the benefits of shoulder rubbing for innovation, they eventually descended into VPN log slinging.
Many employees do not log in to the VPN when they are supposed to be working from home.
Yeah, busted!
Really?
We doubt that Yahoo would give us the details, but from our vast knowledge and experience, we bring you some un-nerving typicalities around working from home.
Logging in to the VPN may not be necessary
This is the big, ugly grey area. Company email is not tied to the VPN, everybody has a "web mail" for the express purpose of ease of use and flexibility. So, you can be sitting at home responding to 1 000 emails, and your boss could still excuse you of slacking because the VPN log has no entry for you.
If you work remotely one or two days a week and have a little bit of structure to your tasks, you may very well be able to do all the coding you need without using the VPN.
And if you run a company whose VPN needs an RSA key generator AND has a session timeout of 15 minutes: dumb.
Show me the slackers
The yahoos who work from home and NEVER log in to their VPN should be non-existent. If they exist, fire them. Not for slacking but for failing to make a tiny bit of an effort to pretend they give a hoot about the company.
Remote working as a reward
A nasty aspect of corporate reward and punishment is this: individuals are allowed to work from home as a reward for anything from good work, to seniority, to unwavering support for an asshole boss. Or individuals are punished by having their remote work canceled -- for any petty reason you can imagine.
Of course, neither the "yes, you can work remotely" nor the "we need you at the office" arguments will show the faintest hint of reward or punishment in their "because" clauses.
That would be illegal.
Everybody knows.
It is one of these marvelous instants in human life when communication
is achieved without the reasons being spelled out.
People are people
That means that some people are really bad at motivating themselves to crawl out of bed. Please, all you managers who read this, give those people a goal in life: the office.
Some people are more productive without the office life around them, happier.
The problem with that: these folks may not know it until they have spent some time working remotely.
Bad company
Finally, there are companies or departments in companies that are really bad workplaces.
The K-landnews experts have seen real life examples and have heard the sentence "the only reason I am still here is because I can work remotely" more times than they care to remember.
Who needs Yahoo?
Nobody.
Yahoo engineers are unable to program the code behind a "submit" button on a web page remotely -- or so you can interpret what was said by the leaders during the first couple of days of the great work from home dust up.
Faced with blowback against their non-arguments of greater speed and the benefits of shoulder rubbing for innovation, they eventually descended into VPN log slinging.
Many employees do not log in to the VPN when they are supposed to be working from home.
Yeah, busted!
Really?
We doubt that Yahoo would give us the details, but from our vast knowledge and experience, we bring you some un-nerving typicalities around working from home.
Logging in to the VPN may not be necessary
This is the big, ugly grey area. Company email is not tied to the VPN, everybody has a "web mail" for the express purpose of ease of use and flexibility. So, you can be sitting at home responding to 1 000 emails, and your boss could still excuse you of slacking because the VPN log has no entry for you.
If you work remotely one or two days a week and have a little bit of structure to your tasks, you may very well be able to do all the coding you need without using the VPN.
And if you run a company whose VPN needs an RSA key generator AND has a session timeout of 15 minutes: dumb.
Show me the slackers
The yahoos who work from home and NEVER log in to their VPN should be non-existent. If they exist, fire them. Not for slacking but for failing to make a tiny bit of an effort to pretend they give a hoot about the company.
Remote working as a reward
A nasty aspect of corporate reward and punishment is this: individuals are allowed to work from home as a reward for anything from good work, to seniority, to unwavering support for an asshole boss. Or individuals are punished by having their remote work canceled -- for any petty reason you can imagine.
Of course, neither the "yes, you can work remotely" nor the "we need you at the office" arguments will show the faintest hint of reward or punishment in their "because" clauses.
That would be illegal.
Everybody knows.
It is one of these marvelous instants in human life when communication
is achieved without the reasons being spelled out.
People are people
That means that some people are really bad at motivating themselves to crawl out of bed. Please, all you managers who read this, give those people a goal in life: the office.
Some people are more productive without the office life around them, happier.
The problem with that: these folks may not know it until they have spent some time working remotely.
Bad company
Finally, there are companies or departments in companies that are really bad workplaces.
The K-landnews experts have seen real life examples and have heard the sentence "the only reason I am still here is because I can work remotely" more times than they care to remember.
Who needs Yahoo?
Nobody.
That cat prioritizes
Better than some colleagues I have had.
Do cats really prioritize?
Before blurting out "yes" or "no", think about it for a minute. Since pets don't leave you a post-it note or a voicemail clarifying their intentions, the answer has to be deduced from their behavior.
We have to take into account that some behaviors are plain old instincts and see if we find examples to the contrary. So, a mother cat moving her kittens out of the way of the neighbors pitbull before she heads for the cat food is disqualified by us. We simply do not know how much "free will" she brings to bear in this situation. What we would want is to see a cat making a choice in a simpler situation, not a life and death context.
Yesterday, we saw just that.
Tigger was preparing to use the litter box, digging hard in the wood pellets when the siblings were given their late afternoon treat of "kittie crack" in the next room.
As soon as Tigger heard the delicious clickety click of the treats hitting the wood floor, he bolted from the litter box and joined the others.
Several minutes after this, he went back to the litter box and finished his business.
Clear prioritization, attention given to the treats, which would be gone if he did not act then and now.
No, it had nothing to do with hunger. Our cats have always been free fed, with as much food and water as they want.
Do cats really prioritize?
Before blurting out "yes" or "no", think about it for a minute. Since pets don't leave you a post-it note or a voicemail clarifying their intentions, the answer has to be deduced from their behavior.
We have to take into account that some behaviors are plain old instincts and see if we find examples to the contrary. So, a mother cat moving her kittens out of the way of the neighbors pitbull before she heads for the cat food is disqualified by us. We simply do not know how much "free will" she brings to bear in this situation. What we would want is to see a cat making a choice in a simpler situation, not a life and death context.
Yesterday, we saw just that.
Tigger was preparing to use the litter box, digging hard in the wood pellets when the siblings were given their late afternoon treat of "kittie crack" in the next room.
As soon as Tigger heard the delicious clickety click of the treats hitting the wood floor, he bolted from the litter box and joined the others.
Several minutes after this, he went back to the litter box and finished his business.
Clear prioritization, attention given to the treats, which would be gone if he did not act then and now.
No, it had nothing to do with hunger. Our cats have always been free fed, with as much food and water as they want.
Saturday, March 2, 2013
Passing
From our Gee-yet-another-Box-of-Books archives.
Unpacking almost forgotten moving boxes of books can be interesting. You stumble upon a writer or a subject matter and start thinking.
Philip Roth's novel about a black man passing as a jew did that for us.
In Europe, "racial passing" about being black and passing as white, or hispanic is a non issue. People react with a shrug and continue to go about their business.
When you add other facets of "passing", such as the gay person passing as straight, you have more common ground with Europeans because they are familiar with this.
The K-landnews resident philosopher interjected a dry comment: Isn't all of life about "passing"?
TheEditor slapped the palm of his right hand against his forehead: "Like me passing for an editor!"
Replied the philosopher: "Spot on, which I would not have expected from you. As I see it, passing is nothing but long-term social camouflage, often for good reasons. "
Unpacking almost forgotten moving boxes of books can be interesting. You stumble upon a writer or a subject matter and start thinking.
Philip Roth's novel about a black man passing as a jew did that for us.
In Europe, "racial passing" about being black and passing as white, or hispanic is a non issue. People react with a shrug and continue to go about their business.
When you add other facets of "passing", such as the gay person passing as straight, you have more common ground with Europeans because they are familiar with this.
The K-landnews resident philosopher interjected a dry comment: Isn't all of life about "passing"?
TheEditor slapped the palm of his right hand against his forehead: "Like me passing for an editor!"
Replied the philosopher: "Spot on, which I would not have expected from you. As I see it, passing is nothing but long-term social camouflage, often for good reasons. "
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