Archive:

Month: December 2016

What is your reason for having a goatee?

By: | Post date: December 28, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Personal

As I said in Nick Nicholas’ answer to How are men with goatees perceived, and how do they think they are perceived? : they were very fashionable in the mid 90s. I took it up after some facial hair experimentation, and Australians nowadays seem to have big problems with moustaches (because of overexposure in the […]

What is the point of life if you just die and most of us are forgotten in time?

By: | Post date: December 28, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Personal

Ah, Jeremy. This is not a trivial question. And most of the non-religious people have converged on the same answer; I liked Bobby Strick’s formulation. When I was in my 20s, I yearned to cheat death by joining that 0.1%. Hence the whole “get my scientific papers laminated and sent to Svalbard” thing, which I […]

What are the best public high schools with high ATARs in Melbourne (co-ed or girls only)?

By: | Post date: December 28, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Australia

School League Tables. Mpf. They’re not all they’re cracked up to be. Is the point of education to get you into a top ranking uni course? Or to make a decent citizen of you? At any rate, the current rankings for Victoria are out at: VCE School Ranking – 2016 If we exclude boys’ schools, […]

How has sport shaped Australia’s national identity?

By: | Post date: December 28, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Australia

I read Geoffrey Blainey: A Shorter History of Australia by Nick Nicholas on Aphypnēsis Amichaiou , which actually posed this question. And if I hadn’t left the book in the hotel… well, I still wouldn’t look it up. But in brief: Australians defined themselves early on (like, 1820s) against the British, for being more fit […]

The Decalogue of Nick #2: I’ve trained as a linguist, and I have done computational linguistics stuff

By: | Post date: December 27, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Academia, Language, Personal

For Audrey Ackerman and Brian Collins and Zeibura S. Kathau. Ask a Greek what they can tell you about Byzantium, and they won’t tell you what the millennium of the East Roman Empire achieved. They won’t tell you about the Palaeologan Renaissance, or the ambivalence about the Classical past, or the edifices of Roman Law, […]

How do I tell a girl she has a nice rack?

By: | Post date: December 27, 2016 | Comments: 2 Comments
Posted in categories: Language

When I was 12, I found in my local library a copy of Brush up your pidgin. It’s a textbook of Tok Pisin, the pidgin of Papua New Guinea, played for laughs. It is hardly a serious textbook: the protagonists are a clueless British missionary and his sex starved wife, the Tok Pisin is respelled […]

The Decalogue of Nick

By: | Post date: December 23, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Personal

I’ve been contemplating writing about who I am here for a little while. Partly because it’s some overdue self-therapy, as I’m in an odd place now in life—at something of a turning point. Partly because I’m making new friends here, who don’t actually know that much about who I am. The pretext for this came […]

The Decalogue of Nick #1: I’m Greek-Australian

By: | Post date: December 23, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Academia, Greece, Personal

For Kaan Kılıçaslan. I was born in Launceston, Tasmania, in 1971, to a father who had migrated from Cyprus and a mother who had migrated from Crete. We moved to Crete when I was 8. We moved back to Melbourne when I was 12. I’ve lived there since, but for 6 months in Greece in […]

Do all men enjoy shemale porn?

By: | Post date: December 22, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Culture

I’m leaving out of my answer the role of mtf transgender performers in the transaction—on which see Do real transsexuals and “shemale porn” have nothing in common?, and the transactionality, on which see Is it wrong of me to enjoy “shemale” porn? I know it’s degrading and fetishizing, but what can I do about the […]

SEEN: Designated Survivor, Season 1

By: | Post date: December 21, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Culture

I resisted watching this. I did not want to watch a show about how the terrorists are out to get us, and the president is some Action Man, and “Kaboom Kablooey Ergo No Habeas Corpus”. In other words, I have made a point of never seeing 24, and I did not want to watch 24 […]