lost in translation

Satirical newspaper The Onion has named North Korean leader Kim Jong Un the sexiest man alive for 2012 and their case for the Supreme Leader was so convincing that it seems to have tricked Chinese communist newspaper People’s Daily, which wrote an online story about the award.

Here’s the screen grab, just in case the story mysteriously disappears later today:

For anyone not familiar with The Onion (a population that may include the editors at People’s Daily), all of the “news” in The Onion is fake.

Those of us who are pretty severely colour-blind are familiar with a certain kind of conversation that takes place when a normally-sighted person discovers our affliction; after a brief quiz, the moment always arrives when the normal finds himself trying to ask “So what do things look like to you?” and (quickly or slowly) realizes that it is impossible to share pure perceptions by means of natural language.