the dropping of the “the” is an heritage of the independance of Ukraine, and it’s important to a lot of people from the region.

it was just an example of how things can appear not important to certain people while hurting the sensibility of others.

we foreigners in Korea know how not to hurt the sensibility of our hosts by saying “east sea”. most of the rest of the world doesn’t know (or care), and most probably will call it otherwise. not a problem at all unless they brag about being geographic & ethnic experts, which explains my FRIENDLY comment to bluejives.

apart from this, I find all this (confusing ethnies , nationalities, countries) more amusing than really annoying. I’m a bit more concerned however when officials of my country make embarrassing comments of the like (happened numerous times in the not so distant past)

BTW, have they done a survivor with different regions?

but hey, everybody’s making this kind of mistake. when I moved from france to japan a few years ago, some of my closest friends (educated) asked me if it was not too difficult to speak chinese…

also, I’m always surprised koreans refers to my Ukrainian friend as being Russian. Even after I repeat “Ukrainian”, they insist “it’s the same”. At that time dropping a good old “yes, it’s like you, you’re japanese !” is the best way to make my point (or drive the guy into frenzy, but I’ve been lucky enough to meet relatively smart fellows so far).

Norway Team Fighting!

racial stratification is one American television’s specialties and Probst spouting his ignorance of Asia, the continent or its people, is just typical of how much most Americans really know (or care to know) about the world.

none of this is news worthy, except that it lets everyone who didn’t get caught saying things like this in public appear more informed as they laugh and feign dismay at the Survivor Guy.

This kind of reminds me of a time when I was in high school and there was a kid whom I thought spoke with a Russian accent. So I thought he was Russian. So when I asked him about it he got kinda offended and said “no, I’m Ukrainian.” So I came to realize that when people who seem like they’re Russian but have last names that end with a “-ko” like “Metuchenko”, they’re most likely Ukrainian.

Having lived in NYC all my life, I’ve become expert at determining a person’s nationality based upon subtle clues like accent, appearance, names, etc. I can tell an American Black apart from, say, someone from Trinidad. I know the difference between Puerto Rican and other Hispanics. I can tell a white Jew from other whites. I can even spot the difference between an Ashkenazic Jew and a Sephardic Jew, and someone from Israel. But sometimes I cant tell the difference between an Israeli and a Hispanic.

I’ve always had a good grasp on geography because when I was little my mother gave me a globe for a present and I used to spend hours staring at the globe.

At work I have three co-workers whom everyone else uniformly refer to as “the Russians”. But actually, Sergey is from Belerus, Dmitry is from Latvia, and Leonid is from the Ukraine. When I pointed out this distinction to my colleagues, Dmitry was aghast. “How do you know this?”, he demanded. I said I simply do. He said, “but you went to public schools in NYC….that is impossible.”

Now there’s race controversy in Survivor, Probst likes to say he is “a white guy from Kansas,” a state remarkably free from a large Asian-American population — at least it was when I was growing up in Missouri.

You mean you never heard of the asian ghetto in Abilene?

Seriously speaking, I remeber from my days in LA hearing how the largest population of Veitnamese out side of Veitnam and California is Arkansas.

1. First of all this is one of those “Reality” show. We’re talking about a bunch of adults dressed in swimsuits in a tropical place doing who the hell knows what.

2. OK, so they have teams grouped into Black, White, Hispanic and Asian, competing against each other. This is racist? In REAL life, the same thing happens pretty much. Walk into any university cafeteria and what do you see? Blacks sitting with Blacks, Asians with Asians, Whites with Whites, Jews with Jews. You see this pattern more or less in the corporate world as well. In the real world, same damn thing. Even middle class Blacks who earn decently money often prefer to reside in places like Harlem. The middle class whites prefer to live in their gated communities in outer whitelandia. If a white guy happens to be in a place like Harlem, he has this look on his face like he might get jumped, gangbanged, and raped.