I love my folks, however problematic things have been between us, and I don’t begrudge them their struggles in a strange land, to do the best they could for their kids. (Maybe their objectivity, but not their struggle.) But what was it like to be raised by immigrant parents? Defensive. Don’t assimilate to those drunkards. […]
As others have said, this is a matter of definition. There are many older claims of such mass exterminations, but without the modern day efficiency of a Heydrich, it was hard to be as thorough as people would have liked, especially if you allow for intermarriage. This is a particularly sensitive issue in Australia, as […]
From harrumphing, get-your-hippy-names-away-from-me answers such as Why do English-speaking people often have strange first names? and Is Khalisi a weird name for a baby?, you will have surmised correctly that I would only go with ancient names that have survived in modern times. Or been revived in modern times. Ιn Greece, the difference matters: Helen […]
As others have said—many of them not even from God’s Own Country (but certainly honorary Aussies, one and all): Vegemite is ace. I’ll add a couple of observations: There are certainly cultural predilections in what food you end up eating by default: what a culture happens to have come up with in cuisine determines what […]
Jenny! Jenny, I know you’re in chronic pain and rather silly about your own pain management. When you get those Zydax® – Injections to Reduce Arthritis in Dogs? That’s not a cue for you to start running berserk in the doggie park again. Or to jump all over the doggie chiro. Just relax, Jen. Take […]
Tikhon Jelvis has just followed me, and I don’t want to annoy him by liking Go. 🙂 And I do like Go. But treating Golang as a general all-purpose language is silly and hype-y. Golang is a low level, strictly typed language. It is almost as pleasant as a low level language can get: a […]
This answer is an antithesis of Franklin Veaux’s answer, which I find unhelpful. I find his answer boils down to “because the West is right about sex”. And that’s not an explanation of “Why is the West so open about sex?”: Because, through long experience, we have learned that societies are healthier, more egalitarian, safer, […]
Cross-posted from https://opuculuk.quora.com/Rolandina-Roncaglia In 1355, Rolandino Ronchaia was burned alive in Venice for sodomy. The Lords of the Night (Signori della Notte), the magistrates who condemned Rolandino, kept meticulous notes, and those notes proved a rich quarry for Guido Ruggiero, when he wrote one of his first books, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality […]
Odd you’d ask me, Habib le toubib! Russian actually is a language I wish I understood. There’s a little bit of Byzantine literature published in Russia, and it’d be useful to access the literature. There’s a bit more Russian writing on Balkan linguistics: ditto. Much more so: Mariupolitan Greek, spoken in the Ukraine, is substantially […]
For Victoria Weaver. Music came early to me. Soaking up the multiple musical traditions of Greece while living there, from 8–12. (Or to be more precise, the musical traditions that Greek State TV allowed through. Crete was in by then, but no violins, only lyras, by an ahistorical metric of authenticity—I was living in violin […]