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Category: Personal
What is the first image when you Google your name?
Nick Nicholas. You wouldn’t think it’d be that popular a name, right? And yet, I’m the SIXTH Nick Nicholas here: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Are you the first to have registered with your name or did a homonym or namealike register before you? The Nick Nicholas’s that do show up change; there was a jazz […]
Why did you or your ancestors immigrate to your current country?
You know, I don’t exactly know why my uncle George migrated from a village in Cyprus to Sale, Victoria in 1947, to work as a carpenter in the post-war boom. I can pretty much guess though: family with seven kids, of which he was the eldest; in economic hardship; limited opportunities for work; and the […]
What was your most memorable goodbye?
Three answers. When I left for the States in ’99, I did a farewell tour of my friends in Melbourne. One of the last was Russian Maria. (That’s what I called her behind her back, to differentiate her from my friend Croatian Marija, or my sister’s friend Greek Maria.) (Maria was in fact from Kharkov, […]
What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever said in a foreign language by accident?
My Russian is rudimentary. I was a PhD student. There was another PhD student, from Moscow. She was a single mum. She did not want any unwelcome attention, so she went with the cover story that she was married, and the fella was back in Moscow. I did IT oddjobs in the department. In fact, […]
Who are some famous people who annoy you for some or no reason?
Permit me, Quorans, to introduce an Antipodean personality into this thread of woe. Permit me also to try and comprehend why we have this annoyance for no (or least no rational) reason. I mean, if you’re not from Australia, this chap looks unexceptional, doesn’t he? Raffishly unkempt, perhaps. Glasses; he could be studious! A computer […]
Have you ever overheard someone talking about you in another language?
Originally Answered: Have you ever caught someone talking about you in another language? A2A. How many gajillion squintillion answers are there here already? No, not reading the thread. OK, answering to be neighbourly, Sofia Mouratidis. I was in Crete. I was not on my nice, cosy familiar native easternmost neck of the island, where the […]
Is your Quora avatar an image of you, or something else? How did you choose it?
My answer is the same as Philip Newton’s, which is the same as KP Wee’s. I do have photos of me, but whenever asked for an avatar, I rummage in Spotlight for “Nick Jpg”, which is rather slimmer pickings. My avatar picture, courtesy of my wife, is me doing something uncharacteristic. Lying down in the […]
How many shots does it take to get you drunk? What does it feel like, when you’re drunk? How do you see around you? How do you talk? What do you do?
We will never find out. My father conducted a scientific experiment at 19, to determine his answer to this question. He vaguely remembers passing out. My control issues are much too deeply embedded for me to recapitulate my father’s empiricism. Once I realise that I am affected by imbibing booze, I get annoyed enough at […]
What would your Quora followers be surprised to learn about you?
Others on this thread have spoken to their impostor syndrome. I won’t answer with that: we are all, as Michael Masiello once put it to me, broken toys here, which correlates with us falling into our knowledge rather than training for it. I’ve never formally studied Ancient Greek, for example. I don’t say anything online […]
If Earth were to explode in 10 hours, what would you do?
I wrote a poem about this scenario. In my teens, which is the right time to be pondering such a scenario. The final verse of said poem is: Ni iris — laborejen. Malkontraŭ la malbeno. We went — to the office. Un-against the un-blessing. I’d like to think that’s still my answer. But it’s not. […]