saki online!

A brief biography, for the curious: I'm a Beatles fan and have been since December 1963. I've written about them and about sixties music in general (some might say to excess) in online forums and in music magazines and journals. My online name comes from my late cat Saki, who was named after the early-19th-century writer of ironically-toned short fiction. We have another cat called Anna, a twelve year old tabby with a passion for toys and dairy products, not necessarily in that order.

I studied Egyptology at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago and at UCLA with a specialization in Hellenistic-era religious texts (particularly animal cults). To earn my keep I work at UCLA doing web design, editing scientific publications and managing conferences. I'm married to another fan of sixties music, Bruce Dumes, a musician and software engineer. I have two children (Malcolm, age eighteen, and Corran, fifteen) as well as three stepchildren (Nicole, twenty-eight; Jeff, twenty-five; Greg, twenty-four).

I'm an radio enthusiast. My husband and I like to collect tube radios, particularly those with shortwave capability. My favorite is our Zenith 10S690, made in 1942. We also have a nice mid-fifties Grundig and Blaupunkt, both of which sound terrific (I like to listen to A Prairie Home Companion on the Grundig). Solid-state can be useful too, of course, but nothing beats a good warm set of tubes.

Genealogy is another passion, a personal archaeology, more or less. If you have Danish, German, French, or Russian ancestry please feel free to check out the photos and documents at the Familypage Home website and let me know if there are any connections to your own family. I'm always happy to share research with others.

I'm also an Anglophile, an ailurophile, an avid gardener , a Unix aficionado, a fan of Japanese, Italian and Indian cuisine, and very fond of decent red wines and good single malts. I won't say no to an evening of British sixties cinema or to an early morning of Tour de France or Giro d'Italia coverage. I like reading. My current project is to read all of Shakespeare's plays in chronological order, just for fun. I just finished "A Comedy of Errors". My "light" reading is Helen Weaver's autobiography "The Awakener: A Memoir of Jack Kerouac and the Fifties."

Sometimes I listen to music other than the Beatles (Renaissance dances, baroque, and jazz from the 1920s to 1960s). My other favorite musicians are Guadalcanal Diary (late-eighties cowboy punk from Athens, Georgia), The White Stripes (presumably no comment needed), The Detroit Cobras (best R&B cover band I've ever heard), and Brendan Benson (a wonderful contemporary songwriter, also part of The Raconteurs with Jack White).

My favorite color is purple.