Monday Questionnaire
Late afternoon edition
1. What was the last thing you only pretended to understand?
2. Fill in the blank: _______ is not a real sport.
3. My graduate program is offering a whole course on Ulysses next semester. What book would you like to spend an entire semester reading and studying?
posted by Eric @ 4:34 PM
4 Comments:
1. A professor was talking to me about a book of music theory that he was comparing to John Cage. I nodded, then nodded some more.
2. Golf. (Heck, it's barely a game.) Also soccer and hockey. Anything where the final score can be 1-0, I have my doubts.
3. Moby Dick would be great to spend that kind of time with. The Brothers Karamazov. Sophocles' Oedipus cycle. Trollope's The Way We Live Now.
1. Sometimes my sweetie gets a little in-depth telling me about his coursework. In Cognitive and Neural Systems, no less, which has to do with topics like AI and computer models of the brain.
2. Curling, so I've heard. I'm not entirely sure what it is, though.
3. Oh, the Odyssey. In a heartbeat. Or the Gospels or the Tao Teh Ching.
1. I was sitting with a group of people discussing materials engineering related to their work with GM. Plenty of nodding was coming from my end of the table, and not much else.
2. Hunting is a great answer to this question. I don't think I would have thought of it myself, but now that I've seen it I have to agree.
3. A whole semester on one book, eh? Possibly The Name of the Rose. I wanted to say The Zoo Story, but that's a little short, perhaps, and it's a play which might disqualify it.
Curling is great fun. I think at a professional level it really should be considered a real sport. If you pay attention there's real strategy and hard work involved. The sweeping works because when you release the stone you give it a bit of spin. Without sweeping the stone will curl in the direction it is spinning, but sweeping briefly melts the ice and reduces the friction involved so it will stay straighter and go further. I just started curling this season, and have played two full games so far... It's really fun.
I retract my dubious statement that curling is not a sport. Thanks to Ben and Ann for teaching me about it.
Of this I am certain: Luge is not a sport. It's just sledding.
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