The Cow Test
I mentioned it earlier, in connection with the Kafka's Crap Friend test. The latter, as I say, is a good way to find out if you have any friends or not. The Cow Test, on the other hand, serves the purpose of determining if a given person, friend or not, has the sort of dark authoritarian streak that you would do well to be forewarned about before getting too involved. I first heard this story from Rossana, a Uruguayan acquaintance I knew briefly in Granada. She had a degree in Cultural Mediation from the U. of Seville, but I didn't hold that against her. Not initially, anyway. Admittedly, nothing says "I am an interfering busybody" more than those two words "cultural mediation" in juxtaposition, but well, let's face it, most people don't choose what their degree is in, it just sort of happens to you, you just wake up one morning and find you have a degree in something crap and borderline unemployable, which you accidentally studied while in a deep ...