April 25, 2016
The Swedish Institute is, according to Wikipedia, a Government agency in Sweden with the responsibility to spread information about Sweden outside the country. One way the organisation does this is the Twitter account @sweden, which is handed over to a new Swede every week. This week it's me.
April 20, 2016
Is there any HBTQ aware research in heterocyclic chemistry?
I don't like goat's cheese. As far as I'm concerned the goats could just stop making it.
Josh Homme always impresses me.
Ticking boxes for the upcoming fieldwork season, feels good. Landowners at two high-profile sites have given their…
April 13, 2016
Slussen, "the Lock", an enormous 1930s concrete structure built to organise an 8-way road crossing in central Stockholm, is headed for replacement and the really big demolition bout is drawing near. Exciting! And an opportunity for looooads of really interesting urban contract archaeology!
In…
April 12, 2016
Torben Thomsen's tattoo
Torben Thomsen found this relief-decorated and gilded pendant in Hjørring municipality, northernmost Jutland. It was his first really old piece. Knight Ink Tattoo in Frederikshavn did the tattoo work on Torben's lower left leg. Torben's pendant is missing its loop, but…
April 11, 2016
14th century pilgrim's badge of St. Bridget found in the River Fyris at Uppsala.
Fornvännen 2015:3 is now on-line on Open Access.
Lars Larsson on an unusual Late Neolithic burial monument at the record-breaking 1st millennium site of Uppåkra.
Christina Fredengren on deposition of human and…
April 5, 2016
Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-90)
Yesterday I finished reading the first volume of Sir Richard Burton's 1855 Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (in the public domain). Here Burton recounts his travels in the summer of 1853, when he disguised himself as a wandering…
April 4, 2016
Two strap ends from the eponymous Borre ship grave. Image from Oluf Rygh's 1885 Norske Oldsager.
Metal detectorist Steffen Hansen has kindly given me permission to show you his tattoo sleeve. He found the strap-end at Øvre Eiker in Buskerud fylke, Norway, and had it tattooed along with other…
March 31, 2016
Investigated a midden on the commuter train as I went into town for a doom metal gig.
Untouched WW2 resistance arms cache found in a cave near Bergen. Sadly no archaeological involvement. Everything dealt with by police explosives experts.
Greek Western heroine: Kalamata Jane.
So annoying when…
March 29, 2016
Space Whale
The past two weekends were a lot of fun.
The Royal Technical College's orchestra and several combined student choirs from Sweden and Finland performed Giuseppe Verdi's 1874 Requiem, an intricate and operatic farewell to fellow composer Gioachino Rossini and poet Alessandro Manzoni…
March 28, 2016
Yesterday I learned about a cool new tradition among metal detectorists. They're having images of their favourite finds tattooed, often on the arm with which they hold the detector! Note that in Scandinavia these are generally objects that the finders have handed in to museums – they keep them only…
March 21, 2016
Pretty groovy example of restaurant spelling the other day: "A là cartè".
”From what black wells of Acherontic fear or feeling, from what unplumbed gulfs of extra-cosmic consciousness or obscure, long-latent heredity, were those half-articulate thunder-croakings drawn?”
I know I've said this…
March 19, 2016
Weird argument in the World Wildlife Fund's magazine for why Swedes shouldn't avoid buying palm oil.
"Sweden has such a small population that it doesn't matter to the environment whether we buy environmentally destructive palm oil or not. The big markets are in other parts of the world. But if we…
March 12, 2016
Metal detectorist Dennis Fabricius Holm made a pretty sweet find yesterday: the third known Birka crucifix.
These little wonders of 10th century goldsmith work are named for the first find, made in 1879 when Hjalmar Stolpe excavated in the cemeteries of Birka near Stockholm. In addition to the…
March 10, 2016
Joan Crawford representing America on one of the four main doors to the Grand movie theatre in Stockholm.
If you block the Autobahn with droves of bananas, is that then ein Obstruktion?
Tim Minchin has a huge hit right now in Australia with a song urging a strangely reluctant cardinal to come…
March 7, 2016
One of the best pieces of economic advice I know is ”Don't throw good money after bad”. Or in other words, when you consider whether you should continue to invest in a project, don't let the sum you've already invested figure into your decision. To do so is known as the ”sunk cost fallacy”, and…
March 5, 2016
Arthur Machen (1863-1947)
Arthur Machen's 1895 book The Three Impostors, or The Transmutations, is a delightfully strange read. It consists of a short frame narrative interspersed with six standalone stories told inside the frame. Spoilers and musings follow.
First the background to the events,…
March 1, 2016
My 2006 smartphone, a Qtek 9100
On 2 February 2006 I took delivery of my first smartphone, or handdator as I called it in my diary – “hand computer”. On the following day I got the machine on-line. It was a Qtek 9100, with a slide-out mechanical keyboard that I still really miss, a tiny screen,…
February 22, 2016
The 1844 bridal chest that my great granddad donated to the Nordic Museum in 1940.
I've decided that although immigration and refugees are important political issues, I've been reading too much about them lately. Redistribution of wealth and flattening the pyramid is even more important.…
February 17, 2016
As with the bones from the 2014 fieldwork at Stensö Castle, Rudolf Gustavsson of SAU in Uppsala has again analysed the bones we found this year (report in Swedish here). And as expected, there are no human bones: this too is mostly food waste. The body parts represented indicate that trench D just…
February 11, 2016
"That's lovely sweetie, but can't we just go to bed now and have a good fuck?" (Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm)
I wonder what kind of event lead to entire 20-metre dinosaurs becoming fossilised as articulated skeletons.
There's been a lot of psychological research into the mental differences…
February 8, 2016
One of four grotesque male faces on a 17th century object in the Tre Kronor castle museum. The piece looks like a little baptismal font, but the label says "possibly a kitchen mortar". Neither function seems likely.
Had some quality fun this past weekend.
Dinner at Tbilisis Hörna, a Georgian +…
February 2, 2016
Sweden's bedrock has been entirely abraded by the inland ice. It sanded down the country like a big wood planer, leaving smooth lovely outcrops known as hällar all over the place. This is the main natural prerequisite of Sweden's rich rock art tradition. Most of it dates from the Bronze Age, 1700–…
January 29, 2016
People who got some very bad ideas drummed into them during the postmodern 1990s are now writing policies for Swedish schools.
New study of twins documents that indeed, pot smokers aren't as smart on average as other people. But most likely they become a) stupid and b) pot smokers because of their…
January 25, 2016
The Opportunity rover landed on Mars twelve Earth calendar years ago today, and it still works fine after driving ~43 km! This is the farthest any off-planet vehicle has gone so far. Oppy's mate Spirit was mobile on the Red Planet for over five years and then functioned as a stationary science…
January 22, 2016
I visited Grödinge church south of Stockholm for the first time Thursday. The occasion was my great aunt Märta's funeral, an event which, though of course sombre, cannot be called tragic. The old lady was always cheerful and friendly, but by the time she passed away she was 104, severely disabled,…
January 20, 2016
One reason that it's so hard to talk to believers about alternative medicine: the sharing of alt-med advice is largely a social, friendship-reinforcing activity. It's not just irrelevant to believers, but quite rude, to question the medical efficacy of someone's advice. This is not the case when…
January 19, 2016
A year ago I took a look at the surrounding landscape here at Sb, investigating which of the blogs were active – defined as which ones had seen an entry during the month up to 24 Jan '15. Now I've looked at the month up to 17 Jan '16. The result isn't great. Four blogs have gone quiet and one has…
January 12, 2016
Fornvännen 2015:2 is now on-line on Open Access. A reminder: the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters who publish the journal decided on a six-month delay in order to protect the viability of the journal's paper version.
Evert Baudou & Ingmar Jansson on Leo Klejn’s opinions of Mats Malmer’s work.…
January 11, 2016
2015 was an amazing year for scifi movies. The Martian, Fury Road, Force Awakens. And I hear Ex Machina is good too?
Tess Parks's "Life Is But A Dream" sounds exactly like Mazzy Star.
Tolkien Society flea market / fundraiser, late 80s. I'm in my larper tunic and baggy-sleeved shirt. An old lady…
January 9, 2016
Our kitchen window
When we go out for dinner my wife wants to sample everyone's dishes. And I want to make sure no food is wasted. So we both end up sampling everyone's dishes.
Danish metal detectorists refer to their finds as "cousins". "Can somebody please ID this cousin?"
I'm a typical…