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What would you do if you found US$500 in a parking lot?
Not a hypothetical for me, nor it seems for most respondents.
I found AUD 300 bundled with a rubber band under my car tire, twenty years ago. I did not know then, and my wife has kindly informed me since, that the location and presentation of the $300 is consistent with a drug deal.
No, that does not mean my wife has personal experience of drug deals.
I do believe I have some pictorial evidence of the event:
What I not-so-hypothetically did, that rainy dark Melbourne night:
- Looked left
- Looked right
- Look left again
- Pocketed the bundle
- Drove off
- Went a rather circuitous path through the back streets of Clayton, Victoria
- Parked
- Counted the money
- Went home
- Invested the money into my doctoral dissertation: I paid my polyglot acquaintance N.K. to translate some pages from a Macedonian dictionary for me.
If the money was ever traced, I figured, better N.K. get nabbed than me.
OK, so I’ll burn in hell. Sounds like I’ll have good company.
What are some down sides of doing PhD in an Australian university than that of the USA?
The other respondents have covered it well. I’ll still answer redundantly.
- No coursework; so you can emerge with gaps in your knowledge about the discipline. I know I did.
- Not necessarily much of a seminar culture (may vary by faculty); so much less opportunity to refine your ideas against your peers.
- Much less networking opportunities, as it is a smaller country. Which means more corpses to step on if you’re going to end up with an academic position.
- One overseas trip if you’re lucky, when you’ve got to fit in any networking at conferences.
- No viva examination at the end of the PhD; so no sense of ceremony or moment, and no opportunity to defend your ideas.
- PhDs were introduced in Australia in 1948. Australia was at the time a lickspittle nowheresville colony as far as everyone was concerned (particularly academics): they deemed that noone in Australia was worthy of examining theses, and shipping candidates to Pomgolia for their examinations was not cost-efficient. So they had candidates submit for written assessment alone. And to this day, one of the external candidates has to be overseas.
- Pomgolia. Memorably defined once by People (Australian magazine) as “a small country to the south of Scotland”.
If you could arrange the letters in your name to make up another name, word or phrase, what would it be?
As I was informed by someone at Uni with an anagram generator:
Lickin’ Nachos.
Which I have done, but no guacamole for me, thanks. Just sour cream and tomato.
And NO CHEEZ WIZ! Jeez, GettyImages®, are you trying to kill me?!
What do you suck at?
Ah, a soon-to-be 100+ answers question that Quora would block as a poll question, but should not because it is community building.
Reflexes.
When I was in high school, I went to the Victoria-wide tryouts for the student version of the Sale of the Century game show. I do believe I can find some pictorial material relating to this…
… Ah yes. The first flush of youth.
The first stage of the tryouts was a written test.
I got the top score in the room.
The second stage involved hitting a buzzer if you knew the answer to a question.
I was out first round.
Remembering events.
I’m great at remembering facts. Outstanding. Positively freaky. The human encyclopaedia.
Things that happened? I think the most frequent phrase I use to my wife is “I don’t remember.”
Which is a downer when she’s trying to reminisce with me about anything.
—Remember when we went to that lovely restaurant in the hills?
—I don’t remember.
—And when we were listening to Kenny G in the car park?
—I don’t remember.
—So what are we doing for our anniversary?
—I don’t remember.
—What do you remember?
—I don’t remember.
Visual Arts.
I know, it’s hard to believe given the quality of my pictorial contributions to Quora.
But astonishingly, I don’t get the visual arts. Poetry and music are where I’ve always been paying attention.
What comes to your mind when someone mentions Turkey (the country)?
I am Greek.
(And Australian, but a lot more of my reactions are going to be informed by being Greek than being Australian, for obvious reasons. In fact, Gallipoli to me is more about the manuscript of Gallipoli dialect I saw in Athens, than the ANZACs. But to me, Australian history started in 1942 anyway.)
100% honesty, you say?
My first reaction on hearing Turkey:
The neighbour.
It’s how the Greek press refers to Turkey, and how the Turkish press refers to Greece. Not “the primordial enemy”, which it was up until 1990. Not “our good buddy”, because there is still too much history there. But the neighbour. Someone we know very very well. Someone we’ve had a lot of bad blood with. Someone we find unexpected common reference points with. Someone who gets under our skin so much, because they’re so much like us. And someone that we have many more songs in common with, than we do with those we claim as kin.
Other reactions:
“Turkish food is like Greek good, only good.” Best goddamn meat in my life, from a suburban kebab shop in Kadıköy.
Kemalism: Secular mainstream.
Towns we used to call our own.
Land of the moustache. Where nuances of moustache revealed political affiliation.
Booming economy, feeling pretty smug now about not joining the EU.
Deep pockets of history.
Place I need to explore more of than just Sultanahmet.
What are some facile equivalences between European countries and Asian countries?
Here’s one that isn’t mine (it’s my friend Suresh’s), but it triggered the question.
Japan is the Britain of Asia.
Consider:
- Island nation
- Never invaded
- Industrial powerhouse (at least historically)
- Home of whisky (Suntory, Nikka Whisky Distilling)
- Belief in its superiority over, well, everyone
- Emotional constipation. I mean, I defy you to read Jay Liu’s answer to Japanese Etiquette, Behavior, and Habits: Is it true that in Japan it is acceptable to get drunk and tell off your boss? — and not think of a Merchant Ivory film, with characters never able to say what they think.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=n_ap4Czeo4Y
Based on a novel written by someone Japanese. Coincidence? I THINK NOT!
- Rigid class system.
- Sexual hangups, leading to strange artforms in reaction. In Japan, Bukkake and Hentai. In the UK, Carry On films and Benny Hill.
In a TV show where people get eaten alive by zombies or worse why is saying “fuck” a big deal?
American Network TV-specific, Anon. “Fuck” gets used in quite innocuous contexts in Australia. Such as Gogglebox Australia, a show showing couch potatoes yelling at Reality TV shows. (And only the Real Housewives of Melbourne say “fuck” unbleeped.) And in the States, there’s lots of profanity on HBO shows.
Walking Dead is cable too, but I don’t know enough about AMC to know why they didn’t follow Game of Thrones in profanity.
Different cultures have different taboos, different attitudes to taboo-breaking, and different consensuses around taboos. With regards to sexual profanity, there is a prudish mainstream in the US, and a libertine undercurrent. Blasphemy is (somewhat surprisingly) not a thing in the US any more, although the swearing in Deadwood is an attempt to emulate erstwhile taboo-breaking. America has evolved a whole new suite of taboos around racism (“N-word”). And so on.
It’s well known though, and a recurrent source of commentary, that the US mass media has more taboos about sex than about violence.
What are your five favourite operas?
I… don’t actually like opera, with the following exceptions. So my answers are (a) not representative, and (b) damn good, if they got past my “I don’t like opera” filter.
- John Adams, Nixon in China.
- Alban Berg, Wozzeck.
- Wolfgang Mozart, Don Giovanni.
- Richard Strauss, Der Rosenkavalier.
Need a fifth, OK:
- Benjamin Britten, Peter Grimes.
Thirty years ago, but I remember liking it at the time.
EDIT: Strike that. I meant to say
- Philip Glass, Akhnaten.
What cultures don’t value gold?
Australia during the gold rush?
I can’t find online corroboration of this, probably because I read this on a tourist placard somewhere. But apparently when Prince Alfred came to visit Australia in 1868, the streets of Bendigo (or was it Ballarat?) were paved with silver.
Gold was too plentiful.
What’s it like to be mistaken for being a different ethnicity than you actually are?
*Stumbles on Quora question with 100+ answers*
*Quora, instead of futzing around with UI details that already work, should be working on 100+ answer navigation*
By virtue of my surname and my un-Hellenically pale skin, I got Russian in high school.
Given the high intellectual caliber of Russian Jews that I socialised with in high school, and the cultural commonalities between Greeks and Russians mediated by Orthodox Christianity—that confusion was fine by me.
I just never got how they got Николаевич from Nicholas. As opposed to Νικολάου. (Nick Nicholas’ answer to How did your parents decide on your name?)