The 2013 version of my school's advertisement film just came out. It's pretty great, and I even appear in it, hot damn.

You think the lyrics will explain any of that?

Well, if we're doing Mendez/CANADA videos,

I'd love to see the storyboards used to plan those videos. Where, by 'storyboards', I mean 'drugs'.

Whoa, the actor who plays Chekhov can actually speak Russian.

Yeah, a lot of those people are speaking either their native languages (with the English we're used to them speaking a second language), or grew up in circumstances where they picked up another language alongside English.

Being multi-lingual is a pretty commonplace thing among the people I know, so I'm neither surprised, nor really that impressed, that there are celebrities who can speak more than one language. Is this actually surprising to others?

As a Scot, I can also speak English, and (with a warm-up) reasonable German and touristy French. My wife can also speak touristy French and reasonable Italian. Immediate work colleagues can speak (at least) Urdu, Chinese, Swedish, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Polish and French.

Maybe I'm spoilt by working in London, but is this that unusual these days?

Well, some of those are obviously not big surprises but a couple of things struck me. One, Americans don't typically speak more than English, so it rarely occurs to us that others do unless they have thick accents. And two, Hollywood very rarely makes use of the fact that many actors speak other languages. How awesome would it be to see Sandra Bullock and Kim Cattrall yelling at each other in German in a movie?