Category / Agora

by stolzyblog

Do Electric Eels Shock Jacques Cousteau?

Maybe you’ve wondered about why speakers of a certain native language, say Portuguese, always seem to have the same specific stumbling blocks when pronouncing certain sounds within a second language, like English. This can be true even decades after they have learned the new language and achieved functional fluency. In fact, it has a lot to do with why we are able to identify charming accents between language pairs. Only a very deliberate study and practice with a language coach can normally overcome these pronunciation tendencies. All this relates to electric eels… how?

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by stolzyblog

Elon’s Martian Wet Dream

Some little boys grew up idolizing Capt. Kirk and Spock. All well and good. But some of them have since aged into their 50s and love science and technology and hold positions of serious influence and have retained about the same degree of social sophistication, compassion and insight as they had in 6th grade. That’s a problem.

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by stolzyblog

Notes on Bogus Sanctimony

Apologies in advance, but against my better judgement sometimes, I feel impelled to indicate how repulsive certain holier-than-thou religious blog posts make me feel. How many blows on their noggins does it require to wake up to the message that we should be, above all, entered into an era of social and spiritual tolerance by now? Above all we should be respectful of individualized spiritual pathways…

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by stolzyblog

Some Colorful Speech Habits

University life, in America, actually used to be about rampant curiosity once. And the opposite sex. Not too much at all really, about jobs or money. Parents didn’t know this. Bless their forever selfless hearts…

Close your eyes, figuratively. If I ask you to picture the word green, do you imagine this or perhaps this, or something closer to this? How does your typical green image differ from mine or that of your daughter or a business colleague who lives in Costa Rica? Assuming we could develop a statistical norm for what speakers of American English generally mean by the word (and some studies have tackled this question), it only opens the door to further more interesting psycholinguistic puzzles. For example: has the concept ‘green’ changed subtly since the days of Thomas Jefferson, Shakespeare, or William the Conqueror? Do children conceive ‘green’ differently than senior citizens (perhaps even the same individual at different ages)? How does this compare with a Brazilian person who is thinking of verde? Or a Mongolian pondering ногоон?

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by stolzyblog

Why Suffer?

First day of 10th grade Geometry class, true story, teacher walked up and down the aisles handing out the textbooks to everyone. Eccentric guy, liked him right away. As chance unfolded my copy was partially ripped in the binding. He noted this a moment and looked at me, and I read his thought somewhat: “Oh well, thus crumbleth thy cookie.” And then he moved on. But directly he’d gotten two desks away he turned and rethought things. Made eye contact and said “Actually, Why suffer?” Then he trundled off to the back closet and got a brand new book to replace it. Little did I know this question would morph into a lifelong philosophical riddle touching all areas of my life. And everyone else’s.

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by stolzyblog

Seriously? You Believe in Leprechauns?

This piece is a follow-on to a short story posted a few days ago here, and it will make less sense if you have not read the other. It described some inner experiences upon ingesting mescalin half a century ago. That piece was a work of fiction, although obviously possessing a strong autobiographical content. Here, however, I am trying to reason some specific points. What is imagined and what is not, and how do we know?

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by stolzyblog

FYI… au revoir


The author in a previous life, approximately 9th century, vicinity of present-day Slovenia.

Aloha, one & all…

Just a note to inform that I am taking a deliberate WP hiatus, perhaps a year, more or less with the aim of working upon a book of short stories. (I might drop an essay once in awhile, not sure.)

Deepest thanks for all of your wonderful writing & reading.

Keep Going!

Burning wishes to contact me can be accomplished on the ABOUT page. Salut.

_______RS

► Handy INDEX — scan through all available ||SWR|| articles

by stolzyblog

Hormone Train, All Aboard

I’m thinking soon to do a WP hiatus, six to twelve months, to work on a book of short stories. Here is one I’ll likely include; it’s first version is four or five years old, but I will do some minor polishing. I’d been thinking about the shitshow that dating has become in the web era, especially for young people who never experienced a purely un-virtual adolescence. Then… I had a strange dream that night, similar to this sci-fi lite tale, situated in the middle of the 2030s.

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