The 7 interests meme
Comment on this post and I will choose seven interests from your profile. You will then explain what they mean and why you are interested in them. Post this along with your answers in your own journal so that others can play along.
devangari - a north Indian languages alphabet (Sanskrit, hindi, marathi and some others) - the most beautiful and also the most logical system of writing. Nothing is "hidden" or "excessive" - every sound which is pronounced is written down, and by the same token you won't see any "mute" letters (written but not pronounced) so the moment you learn the alphabet plus the ligatures (special letters for combinations of sounds) you could read any complexity text, so totally opposite of Arabic. I don't want to bore people with this but I really love it... I just installed Sanskrit 98 on my comp.
japanese food - well we just did it last night (miso soup and sushi) The only Japanese food item I don't like is Uni (see urchin sushi) I like it all, even the snacks...Hokkaido dried squid is an awesome snack, tastes just like smoked cheese... and the rice crackers, I just can't stop with those, much better than conventional chips! Also, I'd sprinkle furikake (rice seasoning mix) on just about anything, bring on the MSG! ;)
love letters - written a few, havent's received any. I consider it an art form in its own right. A mighty challenge to express the most complex and powerful emotion in existence. LOVE to read them in books (Tatyana's letter in Evgeny Onegin is one of the best) A very fragile thing, obviously...
procyon - my favorite star, alpha Canis Minoris, a highly eccentric binary... beautiful, though not the brightest (it's only 8th brightest, apparent magnitude 0.34) - it's white but looks like a flashing police light, pink/blue; I can usually recognize it.
ray bradbury - love absolutely all his works. Deeply emotional, gloomy and so amazingly articulate, a writer after my very soul. A few months ago I started writing something very obviously influenced by Fahrenheit 451 but sort of abandoned it for now.
saint petersburg - I was born there, in the suburb. One of the most beautiful cities in the world, must be in the top 10... but it's not just that. It's the cultural and intellectual capital. It has the spirit. The one and only city which comes close in the US is San Francisco. Also used to have the best underground rock scene in the Communist times.
spectral class - again at the risk to sound boring...a neat system of star classification by their spectra (absorption/emission lines, especially hydrogen, helium and metals) and luminosity. Check out a good summary table here (click on The Classification of Stars). Our Sun is a G2V class star.
hmmm... no music questions, how's that? Jen, this selection makes me look a right geek LOL Thanks for the challenge!
Edit: more questions by
laliquey:
arcade fire - my fav canadian band, on the top of my "to see" list if they tour again. Very different from most
straightforward rock-bands (I think there are about 7 musicians there all in all, with violins and accordion) Very strange and very addictive. I can only define Will's voice as "windy" (when he sings the word neighborhood it sounds like a wind howling in a chimney or something like that) LOVE their album Funeral (named so because in the winter it was recorded several of their relatives died... hence the lyric "my family tree is losing all its leaves" in the last song) Listen to the classic Laika (warning - animation is a bit creepy)
kanji - hyerogliphic script of China and Japan. Much respect to those who can read/write those because they are many thousand in number. In Japan only those who mastered kanji are considered functionally literate (my brother in law lived there for many years but can only read hiragana, a basic Japanese alphabet). I started learning kanji at the age of 20, with a help of a 60 year old Pan Yin... he was a good teacher, except... he wouldn't keep his hands to himself. Therefore the lessons were abandoned by me at a very early stage, along with calligraphy.
the black keys - a really cool white boy blues band from Ohio. It's actually a two-boy band: singer/guitarist Dan and drummer Patrick. It's funny, Dan is actually blond but he sounds "like an old black dude with missing teeth." We watched Dan carefully tape all the loose cords to the stage with a duct tape (that looked a bit OCD to me but it made sense later because he moves around a lot and didn't want to trip over them) At the end of their gig Patrick handed my daughter a drumstick (probably broke the other) - it was quite a few years ago, she must have been the youngest in the audience, about 7 or so. She still has it.
black heart procession - yet another band... yep! From San Diego, a splinter of Three Miles Pilot - the one lead by Pall Jenkins. Pall is a great guy, very talented and kind, so there's some personal appeal here, but their stuff is pretty strong though obviously on the gloomy side. Oh, and I'm adding a related interest now - musical saw, the most depressive musical instrument I know of. Pall plays it when he remembers to bring it along.
avoiding television - very simple. We don't have TV connected. I lived without TV for the last 15 years. I occasionally watch it... in motel rooms and such, but that's very rare. I don't feel that I'm missing anything really.
Thanks, K!
devangari - a north Indian languages alphabet (Sanskrit, hindi, marathi and some others) - the most beautiful and also the most logical system of writing. Nothing is "hidden" or "excessive" - every sound which is pronounced is written down, and by the same token you won't see any "mute" letters (written but not pronounced) so the moment you learn the alphabet plus the ligatures (special letters for combinations of sounds) you could read any complexity text, so totally opposite of Arabic. I don't want to bore people with this but I really love it... I just installed Sanskrit 98 on my comp.
japanese food - well we just did it last night (miso soup and sushi) The only Japanese food item I don't like is Uni (see urchin sushi) I like it all, even the snacks...Hokkaido dried squid is an awesome snack, tastes just like smoked cheese... and the rice crackers, I just can't stop with those, much better than conventional chips! Also, I'd sprinkle furikake (rice seasoning mix) on just about anything, bring on the MSG! ;)
love letters - written a few, havent's received any. I consider it an art form in its own right. A mighty challenge to express the most complex and powerful emotion in existence. LOVE to read them in books (Tatyana's letter in Evgeny Onegin is one of the best) A very fragile thing, obviously...
procyon - my favorite star, alpha Canis Minoris, a highly eccentric binary... beautiful, though not the brightest (it's only 8th brightest, apparent magnitude 0.34) - it's white but looks like a flashing police light, pink/blue; I can usually recognize it.
ray bradbury - love absolutely all his works. Deeply emotional, gloomy and so amazingly articulate, a writer after my very soul. A few months ago I started writing something very obviously influenced by Fahrenheit 451 but sort of abandoned it for now.
saint petersburg - I was born there, in the suburb. One of the most beautiful cities in the world, must be in the top 10... but it's not just that. It's the cultural and intellectual capital. It has the spirit. The one and only city which comes close in the US is San Francisco. Also used to have the best underground rock scene in the Communist times.
spectral class - again at the risk to sound boring...a neat system of star classification by their spectra (absorption/emission lines, especially hydrogen, helium and metals) and luminosity. Check out a good summary table here (click on The Classification of Stars). Our Sun is a G2V class star.
hmmm... no music questions, how's that? Jen, this selection makes me look a right geek LOL Thanks for the challenge!
Edit: more questions by
laliquey:
arcade fire - my fav canadian band, on the top of my "to see" list if they tour again. Very different from most
straightforward rock-bands (I think there are about 7 musicians there all in all, with violins and accordion) Very strange and very addictive. I can only define Will's voice as "windy" (when he sings the word neighborhood it sounds like a wind howling in a chimney or something like that) LOVE their album Funeral (named so because in the winter it was recorded several of their relatives died... hence the lyric "my family tree is losing all its leaves" in the last song) Listen to the classic Laika (warning - animation is a bit creepy)
kanji - hyerogliphic script of China and Japan. Much respect to those who can read/write those because they are many thousand in number. In Japan only those who mastered kanji are considered functionally literate (my brother in law lived there for many years but can only read hiragana, a basic Japanese alphabet). I started learning kanji at the age of 20, with a help of a 60 year old Pan Yin... he was a good teacher, except... he wouldn't keep his hands to himself. Therefore the lessons were abandoned by me at a very early stage, along with calligraphy.
the black keys - a really cool white boy blues band from Ohio. It's actually a two-boy band: singer/guitarist Dan and drummer Patrick. It's funny, Dan is actually blond but he sounds "like an old black dude with missing teeth." We watched Dan carefully tape all the loose cords to the stage with a duct tape (that looked a bit OCD to me but it made sense later because he moves around a lot and didn't want to trip over them) At the end of their gig Patrick handed my daughter a drumstick (probably broke the other) - it was quite a few years ago, she must have been the youngest in the audience, about 7 or so. She still has it.
black heart procession - yet another band... yep! From San Diego, a splinter of Three Miles Pilot - the one lead by Pall Jenkins. Pall is a great guy, very talented and kind, so there's some personal appeal here, but their stuff is pretty strong though obviously on the gloomy side. Oh, and I'm adding a related interest now - musical saw, the most depressive musical instrument I know of. Pall plays it when he remembers to bring it along.
avoiding television - very simple. We don't have TV connected. I lived without TV for the last 15 years. I occasionally watch it... in motel rooms and such, but that's very rare. I don't feel that I'm missing anything really.
Thanks, K!