Everybody's got something to hide, including me and my non-existent monkey. As for the stuff that I don't have to hide, here is some of it.

Name: George Starostin. (In the international aspect, that is. The Russian equivalent is Georgiy, with both "g"'s read as voiced velars in "goofy").

Date of birth: July 4, 1976. Yep, you could say me and the States were born for each other. :)

Place of residence: Despite the above - still Moscow, the capital of the Russian Federation, still a great place in many respects, from perfect work environment for somebody like yours truly to unprecedented opportunities for increasing one's music collection.

Status: Married with children. Actually, one child, born in 1996 and still growing... :)

Profession: Linguist. My main specialty is long-range linguistic comparison (aka the most consistently questioned field of historical linguistics, but also one with the best perspectives for the future). Language families of particular interest include Dravidian (South India) and Khoisan (South Africa, the click languages - and yes, I can click, but so can all of us, it's just that not all of us are aware of that). Formal position at the moment - researcher and head of the Sinology department at the Institute of Oriental Cultures attached to the Russian State University for the Humanities, occasionally teaching Old Chinese and whatnot. (Hence the Confucius on the photo, I guess).

Hobbies: Music is one, of course, as well as all the other usual paraphernalia (movies, literature blah blah). In between my linguistic research and maintaining this here site, though, there's very little time left for anything else.

So how did you get into all this?: The site was originally set up sometime in mid-1998; the major inspiration was Mark Prindle (still going strong, God bless him), for whom I had originally written a few review pages that were honestly very, very lame. Since then, it just kept getting bigger and bigger, and the bigger it got, the more I was motivated to expand it further so as not to render meaningless all the work that had already been done. Music is a big part of my life - it's nice to be able to share it with others via the 'Net.

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