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What would you want people to say at your funeral?
This has been in my inbox for a while, and I didn’t know how to tackle it.
I want my brain acknowledged. For sure. I want my publications strewn around me, the children I got to have. But they too will be dust eventually. My plan to have them laminated and sent to Svalbard looks to be a non-starter.
So, what to have them say, what to have them say. For me to know that it has not all been in vain.
And then, Habib le toubib came up with what I’d want them to say. In a confoundingly, grotesquely different context.
I was a decent person who by and large tried not to be a dick
Yes. Yes, that will do nicely.
What will happen if every dog on the planet were turned into a raptor overnight?
Accelerated selection of the fittest. Where being loyal, cuddly, and Neotenous is no longer what makes you the fittest raptor dog. Bye bye labradors.
Dog leash manufacturers go out of business. The civil aviation authorities might need to work out a deal with city councils, in better tagging raptor dogs.
Significant changes in dogfood manufacture.
Significant drop in the popularity of drones. The raptor dogs really will be treating drones like frisbees.
Significant increase in the military’s use of raptor dogs. Helps them deal constructively with the loss of their drone investment.
Une jolie question, Mlle Demoritto!
What were you spanked with growing up?
This guy:
And not the fly-swatting end of it either.
My sister, my mother would have to chase around the house. I just dutifully held out my hand for it to be over and done with.
That may explain some things. I dunno.
What was the original language of the Jahwist?
The Jahwist, as in the hypothesised earliest source document of the Torah? I’m dismayed to find from Wikipedia that the documentary hypothesis is now falling apart, and increasingly scholars think there was no one unitary Jahwist document. Doesn’t matter to me if the Jahwist was a bunch of bits; that bunch of bits is still more interested in Judah than Israel, and still features Yahweh as a petty anthropomorphic figure.
The classic documentary hypothesis dates the Yahwist to the 10th century BC, although that too is now out of favour. That would certainly be the earliest date for a Yahwist corpus.
So the question becomes, what was the language of 10th century BC Judah?
Still Hebrew, although you can legitimately argue about how distinct palaeo-Hebrew and Phoenecian were at that early time. It’s the time of the Gezer calendar, discovered 20 miles west of Jerusalem.
Was it appropriate for the cast of Hamilton to read a statement to Vice President-elect Pence from the stage on November 18th?
Originally buried in a comment at https://www.quora.com/Was-it-app…
In response to:
Well, if you believe what the cast of Hamilton did was appropriate, then you’d be okay that if henceforth every theatrical performance would include the cast’s comments on the political scene.
… When Aristophanes invented comedy? That’s exactly what he did. Using the chorus to do so. That included making fun of Athenian massacres during wartime. And I’m sure people squirmed then.
If it’s a political play (and of course Hamilton is), of course that’s legitimate. And it’s just as legitimate from the right as the left.
Nick Nicholas, why are you so fascinated with Nixon?
I am profoundly grateful to La Gigi, for asking this question, which has brought together three of the most fascinating personalities in living memory:
I am also profoundly grateful to those who have already speculated about why on earth I would be so relentlessly fascinated by Nixon, because if they are, then they’re still talking about me!!
Even if they’re getting it wrong.
Let’s run through the speculations, shall we?
SPECULATION 1.
When I was in Atlanta last year, I mentioned my fascination to one of my wife’s former colleagues I met there.
Note: May not be an accurate depiction of my wife’s former colleague in Atlanta.
When I mentioned my relentless fascination, and that my wife and I would like to make the pilgrimage to Yorba Linda one day, the former colleague asked excitedly:
“Are you a conservative?”
No, sir. No I’m not. I’m Australian, after all.
Do conservatives even claim Nixon as one of their own any more?
SPECULATION 2
Besides the fact that he was a great bowler?
He’s looking a lot more informal than I gathered; I thought he always bowled in a tie.
But then, I haven’t seen The Big Lebowski yet, where the first pic features.
SPECULATION 3
I’ve started following Tom Ramsay as an echo-chamber antidote, on the recommendation of Clarissa Lohr. I A2A’d him as an icebreaker.
I might need to revisit my choice of icebreakers.
Well this is the first I’ve heard of this particular, um, passion. So I am completely going out on half a limb with this A2A…
Are you the son of Deep Throat? ;P
To the best of my knowledge, I am not related to Mark Felt.
Now, if all the theories are wrong, and Stavros Nicholas was in fact taking time off from running a fish & chip shop in Launceston, Tasmania to meet Bernstein & Woodward in some garage in DC, well, I admire his stamina…
SPECULATION 4
Uri Granta has done his research, bringing up the Greek angles of Spiro Agnew, and the infamous moneybags Tom Pappas (Τομ Πάπας – Βικιπαίδεια; it is so… weird reading about him in the Greek Wikipedia).
Uri has also done his research with the Nixon–Whitlam collision course, a subject I am infuriated that I know less about than I should.
Uri’s third para of course is the right answer, and I’ll come back to that.
SPECULATION 5
Michaelis Maus, welcome to my nightmare. Mwa. Ha. Ha. And thank you for chiming in!
Your vid was by Flight of the Conchords. I definitely should put them on the list, but alas, I stopped consuming popular culture a long time ago. But bless you for including them in your answer. God they’re good. I’ll delight in taking credit for them, as all Australians do with all good things that come out of New Zealand.
Dr Nick appreciates that Michaelis is, to use an infantilising classification scheme, Chaotic Neutral (Alignment (Dungeons & Dragons)), which is why Tricky Dick is a “a real, consistent nihilist after [his] own heart”. (He is also grateful that Michaelis has remembered his little “I’m arrogant enough to demand to be addressed as Dr” aside!) OTOH, I’m Lawful Good, with the Lawful exceeding Good—so much so, that I consciously try to force myself to be Lawful Neutral, all the time.
If you get my meaning.
Dr. Nick, to that effect, seems to appreciate the complexities of oft-caricatured humans.
Yes, Michaelis. You get my meaning. In fact, my first glance reaction was “yeah, but it’s more than that”; but come to think of it, reading your answer again, no, it was that.
Let me though trace my own journey of Nixon appreciation.
STAGE 0
I was 3 during Watergate, and living in Launceston, Tasmania. Little knowing that my dad was couriering information to Bernstein and Woodward, apparently.
My earliest political memory of anything involved Reagan. So Nixon is ancient history to me, in a time that already had the Iran-Contra affair. I did not experience the visceral sense of betrayal that Americans did with Watergate; I took it as given.
So Nixon does not viscerally offend me, the way it might someone who lived through his fall.
What I knew about Nixon until I was 17 was Watergate, and he’d occasionally show up on TV as a pundit. That was it.
STAGE 1
Stage 1 was hearing the premiere on the radio of Nixon in China in 1988. Nixon in China is an amazing opera, with an amazing libretto, that has stood the test of time.
Thing is, though, that the composer and librettist were both stereotypical Berkeley lefties, so they made a point of overcompensating in their depiction of Nixon. They did not want to make him a villain, so they tried to make him a hero. They didn’t pull it off: the real hero of the piece is Zhou En-Lai.
You see a Nixon comically out of depth in the opera, but also a Nixon strategising and reminiscing and nervous and genuinely hopeful. What you see only in passing, though, is the darkness in Nixon; just a couple of minutes, really—“The rats begin to chew the sheets” in the first scene, “Some men you cannot satisfy” in the last. It’s an interesting depiction, but a little too positive to be fascinating.
STAGE 2
1995, I caught Oliver Stone’s Nixon (film) on TV.
That’s what did it.
Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are your favorite movies and why?
I looked high and low for the DVD for years afterwards. Over a decade in fact.
Yes, it’s fictionalised and psychobabblised and operatic and conspiracy-theorised. And having read a lot of Nixoniana since, I still think that artistically, it is essentially true. It’s not a documentary, but that’s not what it needed to be.
STAGE 3
Stage 3 was getting together with another Nixon fan. Our bonding over Nixon is mentioned in my answer above. One of Tamar’s first presents to me was Volume I of Ambrose’s biography; and propelled by it, I’ve ended up reading most of Melbourne University’s holdings on Nixon.
Nick Nicholas, why are you so fascinated with Nixon?
He was a multi-faceted, complex man.
- Was the smartest man in decades in the White House. And turned the White House into a protection racket, with the dumbest enforcers imaginable.
- Used politics as a cudgel, but genuinely thought he was doing good for the world.
- Did good for the world with detente and China, but also did evil for the world with using SALT as a political football, and undermining Johnson on ending Vietnam.
- Had genuine outreach with Martin Luther King as a Vice President, but invented the Southern Strategy.
- Did great things for Native Americans—by accident, because that was Ehrlichman’s pet project, not his; and Ehrlichman was on his side, so of course he’d defend him against Congress.
- Nursed lifelong paranoias against the elite, but the elite really was out to get him, because of the excesses his paranoia caused.
He had a bushelful of hamartias, tragic flaws. The tragic hero doesn’t have to be Good. He just has to have potential to be better than his hamartias allow.
And I have the luxury of regarding Nixon from a distance, as a tragically flawed president, rather than as a visceral offence to my own polity and founding myths. Because I was 3 during Watergate, and living in Launceston, Tasmania.
Can we speak about religion the same way we speak about politics?
Ah, Mlle Demoritto, this question causes me amusement, because it betrays your lack of Anglo-Saxon repression.
The Anglo-Saxon proverbial expression is, there are three topics that one should never bring up for social discussion: Sex, Politics, and Religion. All three are regarded as too hot.
This is obviously a culture-specific judgement, and different cultures and individuals will have completely different opinions. Some cultures, and a lot of people, are quite ok to talk about sex. In countries without a sectarian divide, or where there is long-entrenched freedom of religion, religion will be far less toxic—unless individuals are True Believers, trying to convert everyone at the dinner table.
The same actually goes for politics. In Greece, my childhood memory is that discussing politics was more an entertainment, an excuse for people to gesticulate and mock argue, than something serious and deadly (although there was an undercurrent of that too).
So the answer to your question really depends on the culture of the “we”, and on how much of a True Believer (moral, religious or ideological) “we” are.
Sam at Balena with a Clipboard
In their answer to A celebrity had his assistant call to schedule a date with me. Should I be offended?, Sam Murray details their rather agreeable experience of having their one-time Celebrity Fuck Buddy (CFB) arrange dates through an assistant. After all, the CFB was hardly to be trusted to arrange dates on his own.
In comments, Sam added that they found the prospect of arranging logistics pretty hot themselves:
Haha. I like planning weirdly enough. Making reservations is like a blood sport for me. Party of 7 at 8pm at balena on Saturday night? Consider it done. Coordinating hotel reservations with flight times with restaurants with tours with car rentals? I am getting aroused just thinking about it. Lol.
So…
https://www.quora.com/A-celebrit…
I’m sorry to say, Sam, but the paparazzi have been leaking footage of you with your CFB (celebrity fuck buddy). Only fair you should know:
In this cartoon, the role of the CFB is being played by Tom Selleck. Or Eric Braeden. Since I can’t actually draw, I need all the visual cues I can get.
How does Australian culture compare with European culture?
Some astonishingly good answers, particularly Ben Kelley and Melodie Neal.
To a European, we are clearly New World, and closer to the US than to Europe, as others have explained. Melbourne is more European (and it has gotten even more European since the 90s, with the promotion of foodie culture and laneway restaurants in the CBD); but that doesn’t make it very European.
We are still a long way from anywhere, and relatively isolated geopolitically if not commercially. Our cityscapes are still spread out and very suburban compared to Europe. We still have a dearth of engaged citizenry and public intellectuals; which is why Waleed Aly is too good for us (and I’m happy he’s gotten himself a commercial infotainment forum). White Australians have an acute dearth of history. Traditional Anglo-Australian (“Aussie”) culture is somewhat on the wane, which is not really a positive development, and likely more a victim of globalisation than of us ethnics.
OTOH: we are not weighed down by history, just like the US isn’t. We still pay some lipservice to egalitarianism; class is emerging (popular derision of “bogans”), but it’s nowhere near as entrenched as it has been in at least some of Europe. We are a placid, confident place to live, though not as placid or confident as we used to be. We are no longer a cultural wasteland. Clive James, bless him, was part of a mass exodus of intellectuals to Britain in the ’60s; he’s recently admitted that they were too stupid to recognise that there was a cultural upsurge happening just as they left, from the new European migrants.
Yes, the majority narrative of why multiculturalism is a good thing stops after “um… cuisine”. And there are clear and pressing problems ongoing with our indigenous community, with the xenophobic mistreatment of asylum seekers, and with the twin problems of the failure to integrate Lebanese Australians better, and the stoking of islamophobia that takes that as a pretext.
On aggregate, I’ll still say, our rendering of multiculturalism has translated into a somewhat less rooted, yet open and resilient society. So far.
Why do some people never understand that a library is a holy place where they are supposed to stay silent?
Because they think a library is not a place of silent study, but a place of either
- group study
- checking your Facebook feed
- socialising
- eating lunch (!)
- or being on the phone to their mates (!!)
Incidentally, having just been subjected to the first three in my local public library, where I came for some peace and quiet,
FUCK THOSE PEOPLE!!!
I don’t care if you’re reciting the periodic table in cute off-the-boat Greek accents. Fuck off and do that at the local café.
The more interesting question is, was it ever thus, and is it everywhere thus? The answer is no. When books were being used in libraries, rather than decorative (so, 20 years ago), there really was a lot less of that.