Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Eldritch Arithmetic
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2010 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
A thirteen-year-old, even a fairly well-traveled one who can make entertaining conversation, was born in 1997. And she might very reasonably say, "What's Star Trek?" or not object terribly hard if someone prefaces a Pravda/Izvestiya joke by briefly describing what the Soviet Union was.
Comments
Yatima
rachel@goop.org
17 Nov 2010, 15:31 p.m.
Avram
http://agrumer.livejournal.com/
17 Nov 2010, 16:11 p.m.
How many Pravda/Izvestiya jokes are there, other than "In Pravda there is no izvestiya, and in Izvestiya there is no pravda"?
Zack
http://www.owlfolio.org/
17 Nov 2010, 17:55 p.m.
It's possible that I am older than my academic adviser. I haven't dared ask.
Fafner
17 Nov 2010, 18:27 p.m.
There's the joke from Lehrer's Lobachevsky: "Pravda, well, Pravda said [untranslated stream of Russian] -- it stinks. But Isvestya, ah! Isvestya said [a different untranslated stream of Russian] -- it stinks."
Zed
http://www.mememachinego.com/
18 Nov 2010, 17:50 p.m.
It's kind of weird to look around campus and consider that I was a college graduate before most of the current undergraduates, um, existed.
I think I told you, I spent a couple of hours trying (and I think failing) to explain to a twentysomething friend exactly what it meant to be eighteen years old in 1989, trying to make sense of Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall.