Education from Eastern Europe - Jawöhl!
Hey folks! It's Thursday, and you know what that means: uh... Okay, neither do I, but here's a post!
First off today, I want to throw out some mad props. There are a lot of morons on YouTube, so it's nice to come across people whose videos are actually pretty entertaining and intelligent. One of those people is a young lady named Marina who goes by the pseudonym HotforWords. (She also has a website here.) Why am I so impressed by her? Well, it's not because of her amazing body, although that doesn't hurt. What impresses me is the fact that she's actually educating people. Marina is a philologist. Now, I know that most of you have no clue what that means... But I do, and I tend to consider myself an amateur philologist. I know what you're saying: "Fly, will you just come out and say what a philologist is?" Philology is the study of languages. Two of history's noteworthy philologists have been Michael Ventris and the great J.R.R. Tolkien. Anyway, here's Marina's latest video.
Don't you feel educated? Having studied French in high school, German at university, Arabic after university, and a touch of Latin (along with a smattering of other languages related to those four), I've been fascinated with philology for quite some time.
Something else I've been fascinated with for even longer is geography, and as promised, here's a second blurb about geography, terrorism, and military history. Yesterday, I made note of the Panjshir Valley in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, in another area of the world that was more successfully annexed by the Soviet Union (up until 1991), the Pankisi Gorge
runs through the Caucasus nation of Georgia. Here's a map link. The Pankisi Gorge is inhabited by the Kists, who are ethnically related to the Chechens but culturally similar to rural Georgians. (My next article is going to be about those crazy Chechen rascals!) According to Wikipedia, the undisputed, objective, comprehensive, and infallible authority on everything, the Pankisi Gorge is a suspected logistics route for Islamist Chechen separatists - if you zoom that map link out a bit, you can see that Georgia borders the infamous Chechen Republic. And you thought the Wild West was crazy... And that West Virginian genetic tables were convoluted? I don't know, I've got nothin'.
If you'll notice, one of these projects I've been meaning to work on is the "Listening In" links on the sidebar. I went from not even having an mp3 player in July of last year, to being a podcast-listenin' fool as of about September. (Maybe August?) I vary my podcasts a bit from day to day, but the sidebar should give you folks some idea of what I listen to, and if you get bored at work you can go check a couple of them out. I also added a couple of new web comics to the "Laugh Out Loud" section: User Friendly, and CTRL-ALT-DEL. Enjoy.
Stay out of trouble, have a great Thursday, and be safe. If you're not inclined to be safe... Well, just try distracting yourself with a جريدة.
First off today, I want to throw out some mad props. There are a lot of morons on YouTube, so it's nice to come across people whose videos are actually pretty entertaining and intelligent. One of those people is a young lady named Marina who goes by the pseudonym HotforWords. (She also has a website here.) Why am I so impressed by her? Well, it's not because of her amazing body, although that doesn't hurt. What impresses me is the fact that she's actually educating people. Marina is a philologist. Now, I know that most of you have no clue what that means... But I do, and I tend to consider myself an amateur philologist. I know what you're saying: "Fly, will you just come out and say what a philologist is?" Philology is the study of languages. Two of history's noteworthy philologists have been Michael Ventris and the great J.R.R. Tolkien. Anyway, here's Marina's latest video.
Don't you feel educated? Having studied French in high school, German at university, Arabic after university, and a touch of Latin (along with a smattering of other languages related to those four), I've been fascinated with philology for quite some time.
Something else I've been fascinated with for even longer is geography, and as promised, here's a second blurb about geography, terrorism, and military history. Yesterday, I made note of the Panjshir Valley in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, in another area of the world that was more successfully annexed by the Soviet Union (up until 1991), the Pankisi Gorge
runs through the Caucasus nation of Georgia. Here's a map link. The Pankisi Gorge is inhabited by the Kists, who are ethnically related to the Chechens but culturally similar to rural Georgians. (My next article is going to be about those crazy Chechen rascals!) According to Wikipedia, the undisputed, objective, comprehensive, and infallible authority on everything, the Pankisi Gorge is a suspected logistics route for Islamist Chechen separatists - if you zoom that map link out a bit, you can see that Georgia borders the infamous Chechen Republic. And you thought the Wild West was crazy... And that West Virginian genetic tables were convoluted? I don't know, I've got nothin'.
If you'll notice, one of these projects I've been meaning to work on is the "Listening In" links on the sidebar. I went from not even having an mp3 player in July of last year, to being a podcast-listenin' fool as of about September. (Maybe August?) I vary my podcasts a bit from day to day, but the sidebar should give you folks some idea of what I listen to, and if you get bored at work you can go check a couple of them out. I also added a couple of new web comics to the "Laugh Out Loud" section: User Friendly, and CTRL-ALT-DEL. Enjoy.
Stay out of trouble, have a great Thursday, and be safe. If you're not inclined to be safe... Well, just try distracting yourself with a جريدة.
2 Comments:
Hey "Fly?" (I don't know what to call you!). Thanks for the post! It's always nice to find others with an interest in philology :-)
Keep up the good writings!
Marina HotForWords
Oh I forgot to say that I was surprised to find out that Mocha was a place!
Take care,
Marina
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