Category: Life Questions

Anonymous asks:

I came across the story of Kupe and the giant octopus of Muturangi and find it really interesting! But I’m having a difficult time following all the (Maori?) words in the text… If you know the story, could you provide a summary of it? And is it popular or well known in New Zealand, or actually an obscure piece of folklore?

I wouldn’t say it’s obscure, but it’s not one of the stories I was taught at school; I know it because I happen to have a Maori language textbook that draws a lot of example sentences from the story.  This page should give you the gist of it.  Here’s a rudimentary glossary of words that might confuse you (note: the letters “wh” in Maori make something close to an “f” sound, so the word for octopus, wheke, is pronounced roughly like “feké”): Continue reading “Anonymous asks:” →

Anonymous asks:

If Aerodactyl is from prehistoric times, then how do you think there’s a Mega Stone for the species when AZ’s ultimate weapon was fired only three thousand years ago? PS: I hope your PhD is going well!

crap I never thought of it like that

uh…

I suppose it’s possible that either the Aerodactylite results from some relict population of Aerodactyl (the anime seems to like having isolated populations of “fossil” Pokémon that turn out to be not quite extinct) or that the ancient Kalosian kingdom had some magical equivalent of the modern processes used to revive individuals of extinct Pokémon species.  But I’m kinda taking shots in the dark here.

PhD is actually kind of on hold at the moment, in favour of a year’s intensive study in Greece, with a bunch of other students at a similar point in their careers.  But yes, it is amazing.

Anonymous asks:

Do you have a favourite animal? An extant one, that is.

That’s a tough one… I had a conversation about this with Jim the Editor, whose first reaction is that my favourite animal must be cats.  My response to that was that I have friends who are cats, but that’s not the same thing as cats being my favourite animal (otherwise I’d just pick humans), and that just confused the hell out of him because Jim doesn’t really “get” pets.  I think I might go with the tuatara, which is a reptile we have in New Zealand that isn’t a lizard but looks like it should be, lives for over a hundred years, and has a secret third eye (I am not making any of this up).

Anonymous asks:

What would you study if not Classics/archaeology?

Well, when I was a kid I wanted to be a palaeontologist.  I sort of wrote that off as unrealistic when I was in high school, but actually, now that I’m a real archaeologist and dig stuff up and do proper scholarly research, honestly I do think I probably could have pulled it off if I’d kept going with biology and geology.  Evolutionary history is a fascinating rabbit hole.  I’m not sure I’d have the patience for taxonomic debates, though.  I mean, people can literally spend years arguing about whether a single jawbone represents a new species or not.

Anonymous asks:

Are you a feminist?

Well, I don’t generally call myself one, because I don’t really know anything about the history of feminist thought and don’t have any active role in any gender equality organisations.  I feel like saying “I’m a feminist” would be taking credit for something that I don’t have much to do with.  But, I mean, if you’re just asking whether I think gender equality is a good thing… well, yeah.

Nakedviolentedpenguin asks:

Best song in music history?

Fair warning: I am basically indifferent to most music and a terrible person to ask this question

So it probably depends on what your criteria are for “best” and also what your definition of “song” is.  Like, if one of the components of bestness is “standing the test of time,” as it were, then we should probably just eliminate everything from the last hundred-odd years right out of the gate, and the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid were all written originally to be performed with musical accompaniment, even though that’s not how they’re usually experienced today, so they’re probably in the running.  Beethoven’s Ode to Joy presumably has to be up there somewhere, and so does Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries.  According to Rolling Stone magazine, it’s Bob Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone, which strikes me as having a slight hint of favouritism about it.  Heck, by some measures the Lord’s Prayer is probably in the running; it has great spiritual meaning to an awful lot of people, and can be set to music.

On the other hand, like, it’s obviously this.

Anonymous asks:

What languages can you speak/sign?

I basically just know tiny bits of a bunch of different languages, but not quite enough of any of them to actually be useful – French, Italian, German, modern Greek, Maori… and I can read and write Latin and ancient Greek pretty well.  As a classics grad student, you’re basically expected to be able to read anything that’s put in front of you, whether or not you’ve studied the language before (you tend to get told things like “this book is in Dutch, but it’s really useful, so good luck”), so you get pretty good at just muddling through with a dictionary and general knowledge of how translation works without ever reaching actual fluency in any one language.