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Wanted: For Crimes Against Lara
https://www.quora.com/What-is-th…
Context: Lara’s horror story about her religious geography teacher.
To help stop this horrible person, I have sourced a Wanted poster! Make sure this is plastered across Novi Sad!
Nick hides from Lyonel in a map of Australia
Context: Lyonel Perabo’s answer to What does your accent sound like in English?
In which Lyonel once again regaled us with his Mad Map Skillz:
I commented:
Your maps are awesome! Keep them up. In fact, I think I’ll start doing those as well…
Lyonel threatened appropriate retaliatory action, involving dead fish. To which I retorted:
https://www.quora.com/How-is-you…
You’ll never take me alive, copper! (Hang on, that’s the wrong mythos.)
Oh, and:
Lara will not eat green beans or aspic
Context: Lara Novakov’s answer to What was the worst meal that you ate out of politeness?
Lara declared her dislike of пихтије/πηχτή (aspic), which she said she dislikes even more than бораније/φασόλια (green beans).
We had some banter on this, which I ended up rendering in art:
https://www.quora.com/What-was-t…
And who am I to disappoint…
Beth Murray vs Maisie Williams
The thread that keeps on giving.
Context: Beth Briony’s answer to What does your accent sound like in English?
Annika Schauer, she who once loaned Jimmy Carter an alarm clock, responded:
You sound like Arya Stark! hahahahahahaha
Whereupon I value-added:
https://www.quora.com/How-is-you…
cc Beth Briony: preconception, going in: She must sound like Jessie J. It’s a dead cert. I will not go in thinking of Maisie Williams. Do not think of an elephant, do not think of an elephant…
… But yeah. Arya Stark it is.
(Checks Wikipedia: Maisie Williams.) Bristol? But Arya doesn’t sound like a pirate, and Beth’s from the Saff East, not the Saff West…
… I’ve got it! You guys go to the same dialect coach! Go on, fess up!
Did postal censors ever add personal notes to the recipients, in the mail they censored?
OP here. I know a circumstance where it’s happened, and why; I was curious whether it was really a one-off.
Ludovik Zamenhof, son of a czarist censor, invented Esperanto, and maintained a voluminous international correspondence in Esperanto throughout his life.
When WWI started, everyone’s mail in the Russian Empire was subject to censorship, and Zamenhof’s was not going to be an exception. So an Esperantist had to be found to censor Zamenhof’s mail overseas.
Now, the Esperanto community is reasonably small, and it would be unlikely for an Esperanto-speaking censor in St Petersburg not to be familiar with the recipients of the mail. And given the good feelings between Esperantists, it’s not that surprising that the censor, Efstafeyev (sp?), would add in the margins his own curt little greetings to the recipients.
If you’re going to have your mail censored, that’s probably as good an arrangement as any.
Predictably enough, it didn’t last. Soon enough, Efstafeyev apologetically adds the marginal comment that from now on, all correspondence with Zamenhof has to be in a mainstream language like German or French. His superiors presumably thought the arrangement a bit too cozy…
(So when Zamenhof was trying for his translation of the Bible to be published in England, he had to write in French—and he couldn’t mail the manuscript at all: it was only possible to send it out of Warsaw after the war, and Zamenhof’s death: De Kembriĝo ĝis Edinburgo – 20 jarojn por la Esperanta Biblio (1).)
Should I speak with an Australian accent when I go to Melbourne for uni?
Adrian Beale has the right answer. We’re quite used to people with different accents. The divide is more about international students not having the confidence to associate with the locals, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Reach out to locals, and they will befriend you; no need for the accent. We do judge, but we judge on demeanour, not on accent.
In my day (early 90s), the International Students numbers were lower—which meant that it was more difficult for international students to segregate. My main social group during Engineering, as it turns out, was East Asian. The group included people with Ocker accents (from the country), people with the East Asian variant of Received Pronunciation, and people with more clearly Chinese accents. In retrospect, I realise that I did not have a clear idea who was just off the boat, who studied here in high school, and who was descended from Chinese who came to the goldfields in the 1850s. (My money was on the Ocker sounding guy.)
It was clear that the group was mainly East Asian, plus one Greek (me) and one Fijian Indian. It was also clear that I wasn’t unwelcome, and that the group was not particularly insular. There was a countergroup of Anglos, who didn’t associate socially with the East Asian group, but certainly didn’t shun them either.
Without saying the number, how old are you?
Another unnavigably long trail of Quora answers! Rejoice, rejoice oh ye peoples!
I am old. I am old.
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Hendrix was alive when I was born. Stravinsky wasn’t.
One of my earliest memories is the death of Elvis.
PacMan was a diverting novelty to a preteen in country Crete.
Books were my constant companion.
I had a substantial audio cassette collection.
The fall of the Berlin Wall was a defining memory in my life.
When I went to uni, people kept their mouths shut in libraries, and libraries had a function other than as a drop-in centre for people to check their Facebook.
“2 MB of RAM on the new Mac?! What are you going to do with it all?!”
I saw a glimpse of the Web when finishing undergrad. I predicted it would never work out. There wasn’t even a tenth of the stuff on the Web that there was on FTP networks.
I amassed a personal library of photocopies of academic texts.
The most recent electronic music I heard was drum ’n’ bass.
I lectured using an Overhead Projector.
I made a Semtex joke at an airport back when you could get away with it.
Twitter was the first technology I didn’t intuitively understand. There have been many others since.
What are Bach’s absolute best pieces?
My votes, in no order:
- The Sonatas and Partitas for Violin, as a group. I refuse to separate out the Chaconne, they’re all sublime.
- The Cello Suite no. 5, with the Devil’s Fugue.
- The Passacaglia & Fugue.
- Brandenburg no. 5.
- Orchestral Suite no. 3. Minus the Air; the Goldberg Air is more Bachlike for me, anyway.
- The Double Violin Concerto.
- Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue. Bonus points because Glenn Gould said it was Bach for people who don’t like Bach.
- The Capriccio for the departure of a dear brother.
- The keyboard Toccatas.
- The St Anne Prelude and Fugue.
Yes, I know there are some gaps there, and some of the choices are a bit eccentric.
If JS Bach’s cantatas are 10/10 for argument’s sake, is it worth listening to other cantatas by Handel, and/or Telemann?
A friend of mine was listening to Telemann’s solo violin music, to understand better what was so good about Bach’s solo violin music; I followed his lead. And you know, I like Telemann’s solo violin music. It’s not sublime, but I disagree with Jordan Henderson that every piece of music I ever listen to must be sublime.
As the Greek proverb goes: even a priest gets bored of too much Kyrie Eleison.
For the same reason, I made a point of reading Marlowe, to understand Shakespeare better. It’s context. And it’s pretty good in and of itself. It doesn’t have to be the best for it to be good and worthwhile. That’s zero-sum thinking.
How would people from the 1600’s react to EDM (Dubstep, Chillstep, and etc.)?
This question comes up a lot in different guises. Let me put up a related question.
Let’s say some contemporary of Beethoven’s—in fact, a classmate of Beethoven’s—started writing music a century ahead of his time. With polyrhythms, and atonality, and all that nice Stravinsky stuff.
What would Beethoven make of him?
I give you: Anton Reicha, and his 36 Fugues (Reicha).
Beethoven’s reaction?
Ludwig van Beethoven, who dismissed Reicha’s method for turning the fugue into something that is no longer a fugue (“daß die Fuge keine Fuge mehr ist”)
Not clear that Beethoven even noticed the polyrhythms.
What happens if your music is 100 years ahead of its time? It simply doesn’t compute for your contemporaries; and they ignore it.
Listening to Reicha’s fugues is trippy, btw. You see what he’s doing with his experimentation; and then all of a sudden, you’re catapulted back into the world of the Mozart toy piano. (Yes, the recording I have is fortepiano.)