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Month: September 2016
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, […]
I have two accounts on Quora. One is with my original identity and other fake. I feel more comfortable in the fake account. Why is it so?
People are very, very used to pseudonymity on the Internet. Pseudonymy is the norm on bulletin boards and blog comments, and it’s pretty common with blogs too. This is not just cowardice or trollery; this is actually a cultural norm. One I noticed in the blogs whose comment section I’d frequent—especially how people I developed […]
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 […]
Symposium at Dimitra’s
The question Assuming age, distance, and current relationship status weren’t an issue, who are some Quora users you could see yourself dating? turned into quite the love-in. You may be helped to make sense of this by such postings as: Robert Todd’s answer to Assuming age, distance, and current relationship status weren’t an issue, who […]
What do you think of Cory Bernardi trying to dilute the racial discrimination act?
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-30/cory-bernadi-leads-coalition-push-to-change-18c-race-hate-laws/7796356 I think it puts me in a strange uncomfortable place. On the one hand, I am a libertarian in many things; I am more libertarian, certainly, than my fellow Australian latte-sippers (as opposed to American latte-sippers). And my position is that Bernardi’s dilution is right: there is a difference of threshold between “intimidate, humiliate, […]
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 […]
Is it wrong and strange to like Richard Nixon?
Stephen E. Ambrose wrote three volumes of biography on Nixon. At the start of his undertaking, he loathed Nixon, like most academics that had lived through Watergate. His wife, as it happened, was a Nixon supporter. By the end of the three volumes, they had swapped: Ambrose had developed a grudging respect for Nixon, his […]
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 […]
Can I get a Greek tattoo when I’m not Greek at all?
I live in Greektown, Melbourne. Which means I see a lot of Greek tats sported by Greeks. And I do plenty of looking down on the cookie cutter nationalism of biceps with inked Molon labe, and Maeanders that look a little too close to swastikas. But of course, I’m a cultural conservative, so I would […]