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Month: August 2016
What’s the single most beautiful image you have from your country?
I am not a visual person. And though my attachment to this image is quite predictable—me being such a homebody and desperately attached to a sense of home, it’s only grown on me gradually. The view of the central railway station of Melbourne, across the beautiful brown Yarra river (its brownness mitigated by night), from […]
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 […]
Why are all Quora moderators Satan?
I wished, my A2A’er and True Quora Master Scott Welch, to give you a well-informed theologically-based answer to this question. So I googled: “Satan does not”. Because there’s a lot of things that Quora moderation does not do. I got this from the Agape Geek blog as my first Google hit: Six Things Satan Doesn’t […]
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 […]
What city in your country do you feel would give a foreigner the best idea of said country’s culture?
So. Mate. Maaaaate. Youse wanna hang out in a ciddy where youse’ll get the bestest idear of some dinky-di Aussie culture, mate? Tough question, because of our parochialism, and because our culture has been shifting noticeably over the last fifty years. For the old Australia, a regional city. Tamworth, New South Wales, because they play […]
Is Australia a constitutionally Anglican country?
https://au.news.yahoo.com/video/watch/32478931/federal-politicians-attend-church-service-ahead-of-parliament-swearing-in/#page1 The question has gotten much more airplay around the Red Mass (including the West Wing episode The Red Mass). And Catholicism isn’t anywhere near as close to a State religion in the US, as Anglicanism would have been in Australia before Federation. Ulysses Elias’ answer points out the wording in the Australian constitution. A […]
Why were Jews the money lenders in Christian Europe?
May or not be a comment; but to elaborate on Peter Flom’s answer. In Byzantium, there was no comparable ban on interest. So Jews were not the money lenders in Orthodox Christian Europe. Jews were driven to do different shit-work that Christians there wouldn’t touch. Literally shit-work. Jews were predominantly tanners in Byzantium. Before the […]
If you were caught masturbating, what should you do?
The great Scots comedian Billy Connolly had a good strategy for this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=a0RqqF62Xac “THANK GOD YOU’RE HERE! AND NOT A MOMENT TOO SOON! YOU’RE NEVER GOING TO BELIEVE THIS!” And proceed to disarm them with the shaggy dog story that ensues… Answered 2016-08-29 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/If-you-were-caught-masturbating-what-should-you-do/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
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. […]
How will the easy access to Pornography change our culture?
It’s already changed the culture significantly, of course. It has had a change in what kinds of sex teenagers expect to have, since that’s become a primary source of information on sex for them; but I’m not sure that counts as a cultural change. It’s better addressed in a question like What Is the effect […]