Humanities desk
< September 19	<< Aug \| September \| Oct >>	September 21 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Humanities Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

September 20

Dutch notary system

Please, help to find out information about Dutch notary system, legislation (e.g. Notary Act 1999 and others, with full text in English) Thank you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.195.132.33 (talk) 04:31, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I can't find a copy of the law itself, but this is a decent summary of it's liberalizing effects. Plasticup ^T/C 17:28, 21 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, Plasticup! May be you, or somebody else, have some additional infarmation?

16th Century Quote

Our article on Thomas Whythorne states that in his autobiography (written c. 1576), Whythorne writes "He that wooeth a widow must not carry quick eels in his codpiece". Can anyone explain what Whythorne might be referring to here? --Roisterer 06:38, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well, if one had live eels in one's codpiece, I suppose one would be in a hurry to remove it. So if you're wooing a widow, don't expext action in the codpiece department on the first date. --Rallette 08:04, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I would suspect "eels" was a word for penis and "quick " meant alive rather than swift ...hotclaws 11:33, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

What would be the harm in having a boner if you were going on a date with a widow? Beekone 18:55, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Presumably they won't be as quick to acquiesce. Plasticup ^T/C 17:15, 21 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

"Two chicks at the same time"

What makes the extraordinarily wealthy people in the world work? I'm talking about those who could retire, spend several million dollars a year and still have money left when they start pushing up daisies. Is it that they don't have anything better to do? Why not just chuck it all and relax the rest of your life? Do they feel that they contribute to society more by working? Dismas|^(talk) 07:12, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

There are more reasons for working than monetary gain, for example:

Enjoying the actual work that you do

Enjoying the company of co-workers

Belief that your work benefits society

Enjoyment of the status associated with a job title

Wanting to be out of the house for a period each day

and I'll stop there before getting to really cynical ones. SaundersW 08:26, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Possibly greed?--Tresckow 11:26, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Anyone who works only for money in and of itself is doing the wrong work. Once you've got more than enough $$ to last you the rest of your life, and then some, money ceases to be the driving force - if it ever was. "Greed" is not the answer, because there's an infinite amount of money available. Anyone can have as much as they want, without having the slightest impact on anyone else's capacity to have as much as they want. The catch is knowing how to go about getting it. I'll get back to you when I've worked that out. -- JackofOz 12:50, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'd say people like that still work because they're needed (sometimes) or asked to (sometimes), as experts or something, or have the deciding vote on things (probably). They might still work to keep up with everything in their business. Or, they just don't want to flip. Or aren't imaginative enough to think of something better to do. --Ouro (blah blah) 14:40, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

You might want to distinguish between those people who got their money via work and those who did not. The former group already shows a dispostion towards earning money and working for it, and the increase of wealth over their life probably would not just erase that disposition. Those who come into money independent of work (lottery, inheritance) often have other motivations for working, if they work at all (or work very much, or very hard). Howard Hughes, for example, really had no need to work since he was 18 years old, but he was enormously productive both because he wanted to prove to the world that he was really quite impressive and important, and because he wanted to bed every woman in Hollywood (which, it turns out, required having quite a lot of money, even more than he started with). --24.147.86.187 15:11, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Then there's the simpler one. Some people pretty much define themselves by their work and their accomplishments; for them, to stop working is to lose the sense of themselves that matters. This is true no matter how much wealth is at the person's disposal. Some of us grab the first opportunity to retire; others find the idea of retirement horrifying. For some performers, there's another aspect: there is nothing in the universe that can compare with the thrill of being onstage. --jpgordon^∇∆∇∆ 18:25, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Oh yeah, ditto on that one! :) --Ouro (blah blah) 20:55, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

O.k., I'll bite. What's with the title of this thread? dr.ef.tymac 06:23, 21 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It's a reference to the movie Office Space. If I recall correctly, Peter asks his neighbor what he would do if he had a million dollars, and the neighbor replies that he would do "two chicks at the same time." This may not be exact, but I'm pretty sure it's written up at the IMDB entry for the movie. --LarryMac | Talk 15:32, 21 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

That's a pretty accurate summation, I think! Carom 00:11, 24 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Stephen Gammell

Does anyone know if he has a website or a portfolio? I always enjoyed his illustrations for scary stories when I was a child. --72.211.192.84 07:16, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently not [1]martianlostinspace ^{email me} 18:07, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

We have an article at Stephen Gammell. I've added some external links to it. Xn4 22:51, 21 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Where to find an accurate! English account on Cossack mass suicide in Drautal, Carinthia, Austria at the end of World War 2?

The Cossacks fighting on the side of Hitlers army during World War 2 had left their homeland with all their belongings and families, as it was impossible for the families to stay there for fear of being apprehended and even be killed. Hitler had promised them a place to settle down after the war just south of the Austrian-Italian border. When the war was over, the British military in charge of the region, decided to move the lot back home, in spite of the fact, that the cossacks and their families would be facing certain death. The cossacks moved north over the Plöckenpass to Köttschach-Mauthen, and when their fate was evident, they decided on suicide, and as the story goes in the region, they stabbed themselves or cut their throats and let themselves fall into the river Drau, in their hundreds, even thousands. Eyewitnesses say the river turned red from the blood.

I am looking for an accurate account of this incident in English, preferably not the official British explanation at the time.

There is an account in: Bethell, Nicholas (1974). The Last Secret: The Delivery to Stalin of over Two Million Russians by Britain and the United States. New York: Basic Books. pp. 140-8. OCLC 1127966. The Betrayal of the Cossacks article has a Further reading section which may be of some help.—eric 18:16, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

See also Nikolai Tolstoy's Victims of Yalta (2nd edition, 1979). Xn4 20:19, 21 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Greek mythology.

Request for a guesstimate: How much was written on the gods of ancient greece when compared to what is written about Yahweh? Lots more? Lots less? Similar amounts? What about if you include roman writings about the gods they carried over from greek mythology? Is greek mythology the religion with most literary backing? I'm referring to "holy texts" and whatever that amounted to in Ancient Greece. Am I barking up a poorly defined tree? Capuchin 18:37, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The quality of the tree being barked up is definitely questionable—Ancient Greek and Roman society did not have influential classes of priests, prophets, &c., to produce something like the Hebrew Bible (though the extrapolated claim that their priests and religious experiences were mere bureaucracy, easy to find in the scholarship, is false too). It would be very difficult to find convincing examples of "holy texts." People call Homer the Ancient Greeks' "Bible," but despite the epics' great prestige and authority, they are impossible to mistake for "scripture." (Though of course we shouldn't be too narrow in characterizing the vast library of writings in the Hebrew Bible; see Alter's Art of Biblical Narrative for some suggestions of how the kind of literary criticism long applied to Homer can apply to Samuel, etc.) When it comes to the famous gods of Greek mythology, we do have plenty of texts that exemplify, for example, a hymn to a god. But these are generally in literary & not liturgical contexts: tragedies, poems for the symposium, courtly entertainments, etc. Even if there are notable didactic elements, & if the performance context, say the Dionysia, has religious aspects & origins, none of this amounts to scripture. (If you are interested in discovering exceptions, you might look into some of the poetry connected to Orphic cults.) Ultimately, Greek myth is a remarkably free medium for story-telling; yes, you can evoke "sacred narratives" and teach a lesson, but no, it is not an authoritative teaching with some kind of divine truth in itself. Euripides' version of this year can achieve just as exalted a level of "truth" as Sophocles' totally contrary version of last year, in a way fundamentally different from contradictory strands in the Bible. (Of course, it's good to remember that the writers who've given us the Bible were not speaking to people whose appreciation of religious meaning was limited to fundamentalist literalism!) As to quantities, well, it's probably fair to say that we have been sorely impoverished by the loss of great material in both traditions (Greek and Hebrew). Especially, far more of Archaic and Classical Greek literature has been lost than preserved; our article on Sophocles says we have 7 of 123+ plays. Apologies for a bit of a ramble here, written in a literally feverish state. Wareh 19:05, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The difficulty here is that the Greeks (and to a lesser extent the Romans) blurred mythology, history and entertainment. Almost every Greek history or play involves the gods in one form or another. And do histories of Roman emperors who were deified count as holy texts? FiggyBee 18:53, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The Greeks (and Romans, for that matter), lacked "Holy Texts" as such, at least in the sense we use to refer to the Jewish or Christian scriptures. Greek mythology appeared in a number of different forms throughout their history. Most of it was, presumably, originally passed down as part of an oral tradition. The earliest Greek legends we have in written form are either the poems of Hesiod or the epic poetry of the Iliad and the Odyssey written by "Homer". But these are not religious texts, per se, they are poems with religious context. The poems of Homer become the closest thing to central cultural texts for the Greeks, but they are never central to religious worship or practice the way the Bible is. Later Greek authors and playwrights contributed to Greek mythology by producing plays and poems on mythological themes, but again, these are not relgious texts, per se, they are plays or prose works meant for entertainment. The closest thing to a collection of Greek mythology from the ancient world is the Library of Apollodorus, which was a sort of scholarly handbook to Greek myths written around 120 BC, which is hundreds of years after the Classical Period of Greek civilization. Really, the notion that the Greeks treated their mythology the way we today treat stories from the Bible is a real misnomer, and arose largely out of mythographers like Bullfinch in the 19th century. Berkowow 19:01, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Accidents of survival make any assessment vacuous. --Wetman 19:53, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks all, you confirmed what I suspected, that the way they treated religion was very different to the way we do now. Is it even fitting to call it religion? On the one side it seems like many of them knew they were stories made up to explain the unexplainable, but then it also seems from the multitude of temples and statues and the like that they went a long way to satisfy these beings. Any comment? Capuchin 21:06, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This is really too huge a question to take on. Yes, it is very fitting to call it religion from any comparative point of view. If I were tempted to make deletions from phenomena to be considered religious (I'm not), I'd sooner look around some of "the way we treat religion." Religious emotions & dispositions were strong among ancient people. I'd recommend the standard modern & scholarly Greek Religion by Walter Burkert, or for something perhaps more accessible & certainly perceptive, maybe a book by Martin P. Nilsson (e.g. Greek Popular Religion available online). For a provocative and influential book (while no modern scholar would accept any positive results from it, its author inspired Durkheim to think pretty deeply about religion) arguing e.g. how deeply all of Roman political culture was imbued with religion, there's always Fustel de Coulanges's classic The Ancient City (also available online). This last is perhaps an idiosyncratic recommendation on my part, but in my opinion perhaps a needed counterweight to a fashionable tendency to argue the inverse thesis, which is that ancient sacrifices, temples, etc., were all part of an essentially irreligious political framework for society. (The two are closely intertwined, so interpreters have been tempted to reduce one to the other.) The main Wikipedia articles on Greek/Roman religion don't look so good. If you'd rather read a book directly tackling your questions about difference and what constitutes "truth" in mythology, Paul Veyne published one called Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? (ISBN 0226854345). Wareh 00:14, 21 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Many thanks for your time :) Capuchin 06:40, 21 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I would also recommend The Jesus Mysteries for an extremely well referenced look at how the original version(s) of Christianity evolved from the, well, mess of religions in use around the Mediterranean at the time, including the Orphic mysteries. My understanding is that, while the Greeks did not have any holy texts (as noted above), they certainly did have a set of beliefs/stories/rituals that are comparable to the Judeo-Christian Bible. The problem is that those rituals and beliefs were only revealed to the initiates of the Mysteries and to no one else. In a way, the works of Homer and Hesiod are closer in tone to the Grail stories or Jewish and Christian folk tales; they exist within a mythic world view brought about by another work. On the one hand, the Bible, and on the other, the now lost Mysteries. Matt Deres 15:00, 23 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Australian tax law.

In Australia, the tax laws state that you pay no tax on any money you earn up to, I think, $5600. After that, you pay about 20c per dollar up to about $20000 per year. But if you are on social security, about $10000 per year for a single person, no kids, you pay no tax. Why not? 203.221.127.9 18:39, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

You certainly do have to pay income tax on Centrelink benefits; why do you think you don't? Incidentally, the lowest tax bracket is currently 15c for each $1 over $6,000. FiggyBee 18:53, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Centrelink benefits are taxable income. I have been on them, and not paid any tax. Many times. I've asked Centrelink why not, but they don't have heaps of time for tricky questions, and they don't exactly know anything either. 203.221.127.9 19:28, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well, in that case, it's because you didn't ask Centrelink to take tax money out on your behalf, and you didn't file a tax return. You should have paid tax; you simply didn't. FiggyBee 20:02, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I hope you realise that Australian tax law is extremely silly at times - see this and smile. -- JackofOz 01:09, 22 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

If I remember from my time on Youth Allowance, certain forms of Centrelink benefit must be declared as "taxable income", but are then deducted by the tax office so that they don't really count. I realise that still doesn't answer the question of why. Confusing Manifestation 02:06, 24 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

ref "TaxPack 2007" pp 23-24. This shows the 30 Centrelink payments that are taxable. Annoyingly the non-taxable ones aren't listed, but Disability support is definately one of them.Polypipe Wrangler 01:58, 25 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Colonial control of Africa and the Middle East

Is it a fair generalisation to say that the territorial control of the Middle East was settled after the First World War, and that of Africa after the Second? 203.221.127.9 18:50, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Not really, at least with regard to Africa. After the First World War, the German Colonies in Africa were divided between the British Empire and France, technically under League of Nations mandates. Much less changed in Africa in the ten years after the Second World War, though several countries then began to move towards independence. Xn4 22:25, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The infamous Berlin conference of 1884, along with its immediate aftermath, divided up almost all of sub-saharan Africa except Ethiopia (a native Christian state) and Liberia (nominally independent, but clearly understood to be under U.S. protection). By the time the end of WW1 rolled around 35 years later, dividing the conquered Ottoman Arab territories into outright European colonies was just a little bit too crude for the times, so that they were declared to be League of Nations "mandates"... AnonMoos 01:10, 21 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Israel was only formed after WWII. --Sean 15:44, 21 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Writers of English literature

who are the greatests in english literatures and writers of english language?Flakture 19:45, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Terence Pratchett Beekone 19:48, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Your question is very broad. Everyone you ask will give a different answer. Might I suggest some people would say William Shakespeare? Exxolon 22:04, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

If by greatest you mean "had the most influence on writing later on", some obvious ones are Chaucer and Shakespeare. Wrad 22:11, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

My list (for literature) includes Shakespeare, John Donne, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christina Rossetti, Anthony Trollope, Henry James, Herman Melville, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Charlotte Mew, A. E. Housman, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, George Orwell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. M. Forster, W. B. Yeats, G. K. Chesterton, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, John Steinbeck, Eugene O'Neill, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, William Golding, Nadine Gordimer, Anthony Powell, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Harold Pinter and Seamus Heaney. Among those I won't call among the "greatest in English literature", but who for me are still wonderful writers worth re-reading, are J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Raymond Chandler, Rebecca West, Rose Macaulay, Mervyn Peake, P. G. Wodehouse, Saki, R. S. Surtees, H. Rider Haggard, T. H. White, Ian Fleming, E. Nesbitt, Piers Paul Read, Tom Stoppard, Antonia Fraser and John Betjeman. Xn4 23:51, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with much of what Xn4 wrote, but would have to add (to the greatest):

James Joyce—wrote the greatest English novel of the 20th century
John Milton—wrote the great English epic poem (unless one considers [Beowulf]], and there are numerous reasons why one shouldn't)
Henry Adams—You simply have to read The Education of Henry Adams; don't worry about understanding his theory of history–I don't think anyone does.
~~James Thurber~~E.B. White—certainly the greatest American essayist and possibly the greatest in modern English

I'm sure other people will add writers that we have neglected. ObiterDicta ( pleadings • errata • appeals ) 02:11, 21 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sure I forgot some great writers, and I didn't try to include philosophers, historians, scientists, etc., as the OP was asking about literature. I also left out a few obvious names (such as Charles Dickens, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde and J. M. Coetzee), because they give me a sinking feeling, but no doubt they are still great. Xn4 04:30, 21 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Guy Gavriel Kay, for the poetry of his language. Corvus cornix 18:30, 21 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

A few more, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, the two greatest American poets. ObiterDicta ( pleadings • errata • appeals ) 23:45, 21 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

And let's not forget Dr. Seuss! Matt Deres 15:02, 23 September 2007 (UTC) Whoops, almost forgot Edgar Allan Poe...Matt Deres 19:46, 23 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

List of amicus curiaes...

I was looking for a list of everyone that filed Amicus curiae briefs for A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc.. I figure there has to be some way to find a list in a database somewhere online. I tried googling it and I only found links to the individual briefs themselves, but I want a list of everyone that filed one. Can someone help me out? --Oskar 20:07, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

You can probably find it on PACER ([2]), the US courts' website. If you are not able to open up a PACER account, you can try calling the court clerk and see if they'll help you. -- Mwalcoff 23:09, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

<pedantry> A better plural would be amici curiae; though one person who writes such briefs for more than one court would be amicus curiarum. </pedantry> —Tamfang 23:35, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The decision is available on FindLaw. It begins by identifying the attorneys who were on the briefs for the parties, followed by a list of the amici. Link: decision as modified on April 3, 2001. The list doesn't indicate what position each amicus took, however. JamesMLane t c 02:56, 21 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]