Dear Lord preserve us, someone gave him back his Thesaurus to ride.

Down the hall from my office, yesterday, two engineers had a lengthy discussion about certain abstruse mathematical and physical topics relating to electro-magnetic field analysis. Both had strong regional accents -- one was a ntive-born Russian whose English is definitely a second language predominantly focused on technical vocabulary. The other was a native-born German whose English is a bit more fluent, and who is primarily a high-level mathematician. Back and forth they went, discussing things of an abstruse technical nature, the German accent first, counterpointed by the Russian.

I could not help think how much better it was for them than for their grandfathers, who might easily have faced each other down in the bitter snows outside of Smolensk or of Kharkov during the awful winter campaign of 1941, Unternehmen Barbarossa. The little mise-en-scene of the two of them solving technical problems together, encapsulates how insane the mongering of war really is.

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