Displaying post 1 to 38 of 38
from
ask
I've never really known what to make of Fortinbras in
Hamlet. Do you know of any good explanations of his purpose in the play?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 11:42 AM on July 30, 2008
(16 comments)
Someone I have to interact with on a fairly regular basis has a voice that grates really badly on my nerves. How can I listen what the person is saying without being annoyed by the voice?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 10:35 AM on July 22, 2008
(12 comments)
Back in the late 90s, I think in the winter of 1997-8, I saw a stand-up comedian on Conan O'Brien that blew me away but I've never been able to track him down since. I think his name was David Jerusalem. He made jokes about the Olympics and having been a heroin addict. He didn't perform in front of a mic but was interviewed by Conan. I've been trying to find information about this guy for years without success, does my description ring any bells for you?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 7:57 AM on July 15, 2008
(20 comments)
Are there any good English-language sources on dissent in World War II era Japan?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 11:10 AM on July 3, 2008
(7 comments)
How do I get personal information from banks and utility companies? For immigration purposes I need to gain access to utility bills from old addresses and bank loans I co-signed. How do I get utility companies and banks to give this information to me in a prompt and timely fashion?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 2:35 PM on May 20, 2008
(2 comments)
When I was younger I was told that Kraftwerk's Man-Machine/Mensch-Maschine album had a French-language version (L'homme-machine, presumably) that was never released. Does anyone know whether this is true or not?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 6:28 PM on April 19, 2008
(4 comments)
What are oldest known written or visual description of cunnilingus and fellatio?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 7:45 AM on March 30, 2008
(16 comments)
Are there any terms for "atheism" or "irreligious" that aren't negative? That is, don't mean that someone is "not a believer." It doesn't matter what language the terms are in or if they're archaic or coinages that never took root.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 12:58 PM on January 22, 2008
(45 comments)
In 1895 a Scottish printer by the name of James B. Ferguson introduced Icelanders to football (soccer) and gymnastics. Is there any way to find out what happened to Ferguson after he left Iceland in 1896?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 9:02 PM on January 7, 2008
(8 comments)
My family and I will be in Australia from March 14th, 2008 to the 26th. We'll be staying in Sydney for most of the trip (friends' apartment) but we also want to take a leisurely road trip to Melbourne. Do you have any recommendations what to do in Sydney, Melbourne and during the roadtrip?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 11:51 AM on December 29, 2007
(18 comments)
Who's the Carver of today? That is, who do the kids in contemporary writing workshops emulate? Supposedly, in the 50's into the 60's it was Hemingway. From the 60's and 70's it was Donald Barthelme. The 80's and 90's was the reign of Carver. Has anyone taken over?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 2:34 PM on October 30, 2007
(23 comments)
I love esoteric jokes, the kind of humor which presupposes a lot of specialized knowledge. The more opaque the joke is, the better. However, by their very nature they're kinda hard to search for on Google, or at least I rarely hit upon the magic searchterms. So, do you know good sites with specialist jokes? If not, do you know any particularly obscure jokes?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 9:56 AM on September 23, 2007
(97 comments)
Jack Endino famously traced back the roots of
yarling in the manner of Creed's Scott Stapp. Have the origins of other popular music singing styles been established? Two examples of distinctive styles are the floaty west coast folk style of the 60's (
e.
g.) and the back-of-the-throat 80's singing sweeping the internets in the form of Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up (
other non-rickroll
examples). I'm looking for the history of other pop music singing styles, not just the above-mentioned two, but these were the ones that got me thinking. Ideal would be essays on the subject.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 1:08 PM on September 5, 2007
(4 comments)
Where did the contemporary 3 line stanza form of poetry originate? [
example]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 9:24 PM on June 17, 2007
(10 comments)
I'm looking for books or articles in English on the city of Luna, founded in Italy in 177 BC and destroyed in AD 1016. Specifically I'm trying to find information on the AD 859 sack of Pisa and Luna by viking raiders under the command of Hastein (or Hásteinn), but additional information on the city would be good too.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 8:55 PM on June 10, 2007
(6 comments)
I'm a foreign national with permanent residence in the US living in Providence, RI. What is my legal status as regards driving? I do have an Icelandic, EU-approved driver's license, but not an American one.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 3:01 PM on April 18, 2007
(22 comments)
I'm making chocolate-chip cookies tonight and I have no butter or shortening. Can you suggest recipes without either?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 6:32 PM on December 22, 2006
(19 comments)
A story has come to me through the telephone game that is society that has piqued my interest. Does anyone have a source for the following story, which I presume is fictional:
An Irish man dies while travelling in Tibet, and the only piece of literature they have about Ireland and Irish funeral customs is Finnegan's Wake.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 11:45 AM on November 20, 2006
(16 comments)
Can anyone help me make sense of
this newsstory:
VietNamNet Bridge – Just a few days after the Vietnam Writers’ Association announced the awards for 2006, Ly Hoang Ly, a young Vietnamese poet, sent a letter of refusal to the association.
The Vietnam Writers’ Association awards are the most prestigious ones in the country for written works. This year, the fiction award was given to the book “Boundless rice field” by Nguyen Ngoc Tu, a young writer from the south, while the award for poems was given to poet Huu Thinh, chairman of the association.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 3:08 PM on October 29, 2006
(4 comments)
Why don't I get sound when I play YouTube videos? Quicktime videos work fine.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 5:58 PM on October 16, 2006
(3 comments)
Has an economist ever calculated the worth of human life? It would be an added bonus if it s/he had worked out the different value in different parts of the world.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 3:32 PM on September 29, 2006
(14 comments)
I just realized (I'm fairly slow that way) that suddenly, and without fanfare, every language on Earth, excepting North-Korean and maybe a smattering of others, has acquired
mood punctuation i.e. emoticons. Much like a ? indicates that the
preceding sentence was a question, a jocular sentence is marked with a :)
Now, here comes my question. Are there any languages that have mood punctuation that pre-exists the internet? Or something similar? Markings that indicate a mood, feeling or emotion in any way?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 8:57 PM on August 4, 2006
(21 comments)
Any good books/sites you can recommend about city life in ancient Rome?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 3:46 PM on July 28, 2006
(11 comments)
Is it possible do a tri-country, bi-continenental, radio-style "chat" podcast?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 9:03 PM on July 17, 2006
(7 comments)
Where could I watch the World Cup in Providence, Rhode Island?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 6:53 PM on May 27, 2006
(7 comments)
Today's big science news story about a theoretically
infinite number of big bangs immediately triggered memories of a non-fiction book or essay by Isaac Asimov that proposed the same theory of the universe. Am I recollecting Asimov's conjecture correctly, which if I remember correctly he proposed almost as a flight of poetic fancy. Does anyone remember what book this was in?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 2:13 PM on May 12, 2006
(3 comments)
I'm looking for a good book on the history of bureaucracy, care to recommend some?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 2:50 PM on April 20, 2006
(8 comments)
Michael Wex, in his Born to Kvetch, mentions a book called Toldot Yeshua (or possibly Toldos Yeshua), a medieval Yiddish manuscript that proposes that Jesus was a parlor trick artist, Mary an unclean woman and that Peter was a devout Jew that diverted Christianity out of Judaism (or something along those lines). Now, I'd quite like to learn more, ideally reading the book myself. Do any of you have any more info on it? Does there exist an English translation?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 7:24 PM on March 31, 2006
(8 comments)
My computer keeps overheating. But that's not the problem I need help with. I can't figure out how to remove one of the screws from the case because it's stripped. What can I do?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 3:41 PM on March 15, 2006
(16 comments)
I've just started teaching chess to a group of eight 8-year olds. For the first 40 minutes or so this usually goes swimmingly, but then pandemonium breaks loose. Can you suggest any tactics or tricks to keep their attention on chess and not on antagonizing each other?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 5:18 PM on February 8, 2006
(26 comments)
Yesterday I noticed something on the back of a condom wrapper, namely the address of the International Head Office of Durex:
Canute Court, Toft Road
Knutsford, Cheshire
What I want to know is how did a condom manufacturer end up in Knutsford. Was it by chance or did they choose to set up shop there because of the name?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 10:36 PM on January 8, 2006
(19 comments)
Louis Kelso: Crackpot or economic genius?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 1:12 AM on November 5, 2005
(6 comments)
What is the origin of the cliché "X rule(s) ok"?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 1:31 PM on October 23, 2005
(9 comments)
What's the reaction to the tv show Lost in Korea?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 9:54 PM on October 9, 2005
(5 comments)
Are there any other site similar to Arts & Letters Daily?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 3:42 PM on October 2, 2005
(3 comments)
Did Patrick Henry ever do anything he's credited with? Especially all those stirring phrases that he is supposed to have said. I read in Made in America by Bill Bryson that Patrick Henry had been rather uninteresting buffoon but that a later biographer had claimed that he said all these great things.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 12:04 PM on June 12, 2005
(17 comments)
I bought a new computer in January this year that lately has slowed up considerably. How do I get it back up to something resembling its original speed?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 6:23 AM on June 5, 2005
(17 comments)
I currently live in Iceland but I'm immigrating to the US this summer. I have a cell phone that I'm quite attached to (
Nokia 2650) and would like to be able to use it in the US (I'm moving to NYC or Boston, if that matters any). Googling for info has told me that this is impossible. Is there something I can do or will have to resign myself to getting another handset when I've moved to the US?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Kattullus
at 10:03 AM on May 14, 2005
(16 comments)
