Yeah, the Ninth for me too. Not just for the finale: the first three movements are wonderful, and there’s sublimity in the Adagio.
It’s hard to do favourites, and I love all the odd-numbered symphonies (apart from the 1st, which is still Mozart on Red Bull, as JM Cortese put it). The 5th and 7th are both extremely tight constructions. But I’m too jaded now for their optimism to work on me like it used to.
The questions I find on my own, I answer quickly and enthusiastically.
I’ve become enough of a MVW that I get a fair few A2As, something like 10 a day. The quality is variable, and I don’t pass on A2As as aggressively as I should, so I’ve got a sizeable backlog, with some A2As just staring back at me annoyingly for weeks.
So A2As that I don’t answer immediately feel a lot more like a chore; and enough of a backlog becomes really demotivating. I try to keep the backlog down to 10–15.
That said, A2As are more on topic for your core topics of interest than questions you find randomly; so answering some of this, in fact, good for your stats. (There are also some askers who keep asking me questions I’ve already told them I don’t have competence in. Those I now quickly pass on.)
There are some A2As that I answer “only ’cause it’s you”. They can in fact end up being fun, because I have a bit more of an excuse to make them humorous.
Heather Paige Dubrow (née Kent; born January 5, 1969) is an American actress and television personality. She portrayed Lydia DeLucca in the television series That’s Life in 2000, and has starred on the reality television series The Real Housewives of Orange County since its seventh season in 2012.
Heather Dubrow is deeply awesome, cool, and wonderful, for several reasons, not restricted to the following:
When I was lecturing historical linguistics, I addressed this notion as follows:
“Just picture the 19th century German linguist, captured by cannibals and boiling away in a cauldron, saying: [German accent] ‘Hah! Zis is ein joke! You people are all pussies! You do not even haff ein alveolar affrikat!’”
And beware of cause and effect in cultural judgements. It’s not necessarily that the sound of French motivated the French to be connoiseurs and romantique. It’s more that the cultural stereotype of the French as connoiseurs and romantique has led to people think of French that way. If you’re not getting a similar vibe out of Turkish (which to my mind sounds pretty similar), then it’s not the sounds you’re reacting to.
That, and I’m pretty sure the recruits in the French Foreign Legion don’t find anything romantique about their sergeant screaming at them en français.
Same answer, man. If I wanted to have a competent grasp of probability, I would have stayed in engineering.
Take the money and run.
Why… with one million dollars… I could almost afford a decent house here in Melbourne!
Almost.
Pegah Esmaili’s answer to Do ex-Muslims face discrimination at their homes?
No not at all, only my grandmother has a few times looked at me as if “what the fu*k are you trying to be my beloved damn grandchild? weren’t you praying till…like 2-3 years ago?”
https://www.quora.com/Do-ex-Musl…
It looked a little bit like this, didn’t it?
I did leave out Pegah’s altar to a potato chip. Luckily.
You wanna know how it feels like to write 1000 answers?
Well this is how it feels like!
It feels like I should be grateful to Brian Bi for t3nsor/quora-backup. Which has made THIS possible:
In glorious Baskerville.
Yeah, Baskerville! Fond memories of my childhood World Book Encyclopaedia.
The plain Greek is a bit lumpy, but the italics make up for it. Almost.
Seriously? I do feel a sense of achievement. Some of those answers have been throwaway, but most of those answers, I’m proud of, throwaway or not. They’ve been me. And they’ve captured some good journeys.
Following Uri Granta’s lead, a few stats about the journey, although I’ve focused on different things.
The distribution of topics on the profile page is a sledgehammer, and I prefer to have a priority list of narrower topics. The topics list also doesn’t capture topics you don’t know about, but write about anyway.
Here’s my topic list as *I* actually like to think of it. Catch-all topics in boldface.
Greek Alphabet: 8
Modern Greek: 10
Greek Language: 201
English Language: 94
Latin: 9
Esperanto: 9
Lojban: 6
Klingon: 6
Specific languages: 27
Historical Linguistics: 13
Semantics: 7
Pragmatics: 4
Profanity: 4
Dialects: 13
Linguistics: 87
Etymology: 16
Diacritics: 3
Capitalisation: 3
Surnames: 7
Names and Naming: 5
Writing Systems: 3
Alphabets: 5
Language: 31
Grammar: 9
Words: 4
Crete: 7
Ancient Greece: 20
Roman Empire: 9
Ottoman Empire: 6
Greek History: 3
Culture of Greece: 7
Classics: 4
Greek Ethnicity and People: 12
Greek Mythology: 6
Cyprus: 2
Greece: 23
Politics of Australia: 6
People of Australia: 6
Australia: 15
Classical Music: 17
Music: 11
Orthodox Christianity: 3
Richard M. Nixon: 6
Quora Usage Data: 10
Quora Community: 12
Quora: 78
Survey Question: 26
Other: 129
… That’s a lot of Other; and I really couldn’t get it any more granular.
At least the blues in the pie chart confirm it: I’m still a linguist.
The graph of the addiction seems to point to January and June:
And how loquacious have I been?
Minimum 1, maximum 1715, average 191, median 147, mode 81.
Top 10:
7/10.
Top 50:
14/20
Top 200:
24/200, but I’m sure a couple of those are technicalities.
I tied with Peter Flom, which surprises me.
Missing from the list:
That was awesome fun, Jordan. Let’s do it again some time!
Another cultural Orthodox here. I too was allowed beer with lemonade or watered down wine as a kid. I was also told I couldn’t be a sinner as a kid, because I didn’t have the capacity of mature judgement yet. (The legal system acts in a similar way.)
I presume your parents are just using sin to discourage you without having to explain themselves. Greeks in their position might say krima “shame”, maybe even krima apo to Theo “shame according to God”. But I’d be surprised if they used the term amartia “sin”.
Thank you very much, OP, for providing the link.
This is in fact the same letter as that other one you provided, Can modern day Greeks understand and read ancient scriptures in ancient ruins (Like this one?)
Since you’ve provided a clean transcription I don’t have to squint at, happy to do it:
King Antiochus to Menedemus, Greetings.
We want to increase the honours of our sister Queen Laodice even more, and we consider this most necessary, not only so we can live with her caringly and like a guardian, but also because we want to act piously towards sacred things. And we are taking care to do what we should do and what it is right to do, to meet her needs, with family-like love. And we have decided, just as head priests commemorating us have been set up during our reign, that head priestesses commemorating her should be set up in the same places, who will wear golden crowns bearing her image; and they will be enrolled in the covenants, along with the head priests of our ancestors and our current head priests. So since Laodice was brought up in the places under your rule, let everything written above be carried out, and let copies of the letters be written on columns and set up in the most conspicuous places, so that now and forever our favour to our sister should be made clear through these.
119th year of the Seleucids, month of Xanthicus.
