Ask MuppetFace Stuff

For my field it's mostly Ancient Greek and Latin. Some Old English.
I'd like to eventually resume my study of Arabic and Ancient Hebrew. Didn't get very far there.

Picking up Italian wasn't difficult, as I know Spanish for familial reasons.
I also know Basque which is rather exotic. Again, for familial reasons.

 

WT... I saw a TV commercial and was considering asking my doctor for this to treat chronic psoriasis.

 

Yeah, the class of "biologic" medications that are used to treat imflammatory conditions---Crohn's, arthritis, psoriasis, etc.---all carry a black box warning from the FDA, which means they have possible side effects which are life threatening. That includes Humira, Cimzia, Remicade, and all their ilk.

Definitely a case of the cure potentially being worse than the disease. In my case, I reluctantly took them because I couldn't afford to lose more intestine. Otherwise I'd steer clear.

 

Didn't you post a question, @MoatsArt? Did you delete it?

 

Feel free to ask non-audio related stuff. This is the "random thoughts" section, after all.

@MoatsArt The one part of your question I remember was about the Basque language. This is a pretty good read if you're curious about its history and relationship with other languages: http://hisp462.tamu.edu/Classes/603/Lects/BasqueHist.pdf

 

1. Can't pick just one. So here are twenty off the top of my head:

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Satires by Horace
Praise of Folly by Erasmus
Confessions by St. Augustine
The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius
Pensées by Blaise Pascal
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
The Once and Future King by T. H. White
Auto-da-Fe by Elias Canetti
Hunger by Knut Hamsun
Jakob Von Gunten by Robert Walser
Watt by Samuel Beckett
The Waiting Years by Fumiko Enchi
Zeno's Conscience by Italo Svevo
The Book of Sand by Jorge Luis Borges
The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil

2. Pretty much any of Plato's works are my favorite to teach.
No matter how well you think you know them, you don't.

 

1. The New Testament is always a good starting point, even if you're not religious. Each Gospel has its own particular writing style.

2. Try http://petrarch.petersadlon.com/his_writings.html
Or http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Italian/Petrarchhome.htm

3. No problemo.

4. http://www.omniglot.com/writing/oldenglish.htm
http://www.thehistoryofenglish.com/history_old.html
https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol/engol

5. 'Fraid not!

 

Nope. Just the cables that came with the headphones.

I've experimented with some high-end interconnects that were loaned to me, and the results were actually more apparent than I would have assumed, but it was maybe like a 2% improvement in instrument separation and spatial cues? For me at the time, they weren't really worth their expensive price. Plus that could have just been temporary insanity, so who knows.

As a collector of IEMs however, some of those fancy little cables are admittedly enticing. Mostly I just want something good from an ergonomic standpoint.