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What is your favorite composition by John Adams?
It’s still Nixon in China for me. I have a soft spot for Short Ride In A Fast Machine, even if it is all flash. Harmonilehre, as a third pressing of Mahler. Grand Pianola Music, for the sheer impudence of it. (Lolapalooza does that too.)
What is the coolest way to handle a man hitting on your girlfriend/wife?
So, me and the missus are on our honeymoon in Europe, and our travels take us to Florence. My wife, an Under the Tuscan Sun (book) tragic, wants to retrace her steps from the last time she was in town, through San Gimignano, Siena, Orvieto (in deepest darkest Umbria), and Cortona.
Actually, Orvieto was my idea, mainly coz it wasn’t in fricking Tuscany, and it had a shiny cathedral.
To make our way through the Stations of the Frances Mayes would have been straightforward, had we gotten our own wheels while in Europe. This, however, was not going to happen: I am a nervous driver at the best of times, and I persuaded my better half that for the two or three times on our trip that we could not rely on European rail, we could prevail on local drivers. So we procured the services of a Florentine driver on TripAdvisor.
Ah yes. The Florentine driver on TripAdvisor. He had excellent ratings from American tourists; and my sharp, ebullient, incisive life partner had failed to notice that all these ratings happened to have come from single female tourists, who were also retracing the Stations of the Frances Mayes.
So as we set off of a sunny winter morning from the Renaissance and Leather Emporium that is Florence, our driver (let’s call him Ordelafo, because I’m currently reading Venetian history, and why not anyway) regales us of tales of the construction of the bridges of Florence. As we left the bridges behind us, he then took up tales of his pickup successes over the years—first as an undercover cop spending entirely too much time in bars, and then as a driver ferrying American Frances Mayes acolytes up and down Tuscany.
As part of his recitation, and after enumerating the single digit number of US states he had not made a romantic conquest from, Signor Ordelafo outlined his three criteria for a desirable female companion.
- Not, eh, Italian. (Because Italian women would not put up with his palaver.)
- Not to wear the too much, eh, makeup.
- And eh, how you say, eh, chesty.
I looked across at my pulchritudinous, effervescent, Armenian, cosmetics-eschewing, buxom life partner, mentally ticked off Ordelafo’s criteria, rifled though the bits of Italian I had picked up on the streets of Melbourne, and arched my eyebrow as I said to him:
Ma questa è già sposata.
The missus was quite curious about why Ordelafo did not say a word to us from the outskirts of San Gimignano, up until our return to Florence nine hours later.
What I had said was, simply enough:
But this one’s already married.
I have an impression that some Aussies are overly ‘patriotic’ or over-loving their country. Is this true?
Other respondents have argued that Australians are not overly patriotic compared to Americans. They are dismissing patriotism as the preserve of bogans. However 20 years ago, bogans did not express patriotism any more overtly than the elite; and wrapping yourself in the flag, particularly during a race riot like the 2005 Cronulla riots, would have been unthinkable. (60 years ago of course patriotism was expressed in terms of the British Empire.)
The Xenophobe’s Guide to Aussies published 20 years ago summarised Australian patriotism as:
Australians already know they live in the best country on Earth and they don’t particularly feel the need to tell anyone about it.
What has changed in the interim is a combination of fear of globalization and reactionary politicking by John Howard. Howard is gone, but as the popularity of the monarchy and pilgrimages to Gallipoli attest (complete with youths wrapping themselves in the flag at dawn), the effects endure. Aussie patriotism is much louder than it used to be.
Is the bible just a history book or is there more to it than that?
Are they all not just history books concluding to have some moral message to help us live our lives? Because if this is true, then life should be put first before religions. And nobody should take a life of a preacher or one dedicated in a path to understand religion. It’s secondary is it not?
Other respondents are responding to the OP’s use of “history” vs “story” (mythology). But OP’s question is, if the Bible is not divine, then one’s morality cannot derive from religion, but affirmation of life.
It’ll interest OP to know that there was a prominent theologian who came to pretty much that conclusion. This theologian pioneered Historical Jesus research, and came to the conclusion that the actual Jesus was all about the end of the world—and since the world has not ended, that Christianity was founded on a lie. (Subsequent Historical Jesus researchers have concluded that the end-of-the-world guy was John the Baptist, not Jesus, but that’s not the point here.)
So. You are a big time theologian, and you have just proven to yourself in your forties that everything you believed in is a lie. What do you do?
You switch jobs, study medicine, and go to Africa to heal the sick. “Life should be put first.” In fact, your personal philosophy Reverence for Life.
Ok, that’s one take on it, and I see that it’s not Wikipedia’s take on Albert Schweitzer: he articulated quite Christian motives for dropping theology and taking up medicine (and he didn’t really drop theology for that matter). But clearly he did not stay an orthodox Christian, and he had a crisis of faith after confronting the issue of literal truth in the New Testament.
How often do you have to write formally and with proper grammar at your current job?
I’ve switched careers from being a humanities academic to being a business analyst. Currently I’m more a data analyst with a sideline in IT architecture and policy. The clarification is important, because business analysts are more human-facing than data analysts.
I switched from natively writing in Dickensian paragraphs, to natively writing in dot points. My audience would much rather read something created in Powerpoint, than something created in Word. I learned that there was not that much point correcting simple spelling mistakes from colleagues (though that’s not as much of an issue in my current position!) I relearned something I had learned before linguistics, when I was interning as an engineer: I am writing for people who would rather not be reading what I am writing, so I don’t get points for eloquence or cleverness—just concision.
I still happen to write formally, because of my training (although I use less semicolons than I used to); but I notice that few of my colleagues or their bosses bother. I have one boss who is a stickler for formal (and impersonal) tone, but I strongly suspect this is a generational thing. In fact, I’ve been in the middle of an edit war between bosses on formal tone of a document. I like the subjunctive, but have found that it outright confuses colleagues; then again, the subjunctive is now mostly an American affectation in the Commonwealth.
All that said, precision is valued in my job, so “proper grammar” is appreciated.
Is Hawaii a common honeymoon destination for newly married Australian couples?
My wife has been consistently advocating for Hawaii to anyone she knows, and we did in fact get engaged there. But we’re not typical of Australians: we’ve both lived in the States, and we’re not drawn to Indonesia. (Which is why she needs to do advocacy.)
That said, Hawaii was full of Australians when we went—which put us off, as we didn’t go halfway across the Pacific just to hear Australian accents all over Waikiki. I didn’t check how many were honeymooners.
The shopping was a drawcard; even with the weakened Australian dollar, most goods are much cheaper in the US than here.
What is it like to live in Irvine, CA?
I lived in Irvine from 1999 to 2001, though it doesn’t sound like much has changed since. I was in my late 20s, an urbanite, with no car. It was horrid.
Irvine had just gotten Safest City in America status, with zero murders in the past year. After a few months there, I took to saying that it all made sense: people have to be alive before they can be killed.
What are some interesting facts about Western Australia most don’t know?
Western Australian (or as Victorians unaffectionately call them, Sandgropers) don’t really act like they want to be in the same country as the more unwesterly states. I remember Dick Smith jams falling afoul of the Buy West Australian campaign, because their jams were bottled in Victoria.
And in 1933, they almost got their wish: Western Australian secession referendum, 1933.
What people don’t know (and I broadcast whenever WA comes up in conversation), is that the referendum passed.
It didn’t go anywhere, because like loyal British subjects, WA took the matter to London. And London had just passed the Statute of Westminster 1931, whereby Commonwealth countries could, like, run their own countries (“The main effect was the removal of the ability of the British parliament to legislate for the Dominions”). This made Western Australian secession Not London’s Problem.
Canberra (and Perth) had not ratified the Statute, and didn’t until 19-fricking-42; but Canberra was hardly likely to object to the outcome. The government that had proposed the referendum got voted out in the same election; so Perth didn’t care either. So the WA delegates sulked around London for a couple of years, and went back home.
EDIT: for a far better account, I direct you to the magisterial Carter Moore’s answer to What would have happened if Australia had been partitioned in 1933?
What is it like to have the same first name as your last name?
Not that big a deal, although I think it’s meant I’m not as emotionally attached to my surname as I could have been. (I’m more attached to the “Dr.” 🙂 The surname hasn’t been in the family that long anyway.
The jokes I hear when I’m introduced to people get old pretty quick, so I roll my eyes and move on. Last few years, I’ve been preempting them by coopting the New York saying: They liked me so much, they named me twice. And before that, I’d make a point of saying that I have three cousins with the same name. (Greek Cypriot naming practices: father’s patronymic as surname, and grandfather’s name as given name.)
Epictetus, Discourses I 1
Well, I don’t know if this is a good idea at all. But this is one of my favourite passages of Ancient Greek. Rendered in GoAnimate, with pseudo-Laurence Olivier Text-To-Speech. Epictetus, Discourses I 1, in the Loeb Oldfather translation from 1925.