Pieces of Mind

WTF! Ugly digital version of the wonderful claymation Shaun the Sheep! Curses! Top three Women As Sex Robots songs: Rollergirl: Superstar. Teddybears Sthlm: Yours To Keep. Kylie Minogue: Can't Get You Out Of My Head. In the otherwise excellent boardgame Lords of Waterdeep there's a quest called "Retrieve Ancient Artefacts". Come on, do I really have to deal with work during game night too? Shampoo is hársápa in Icelandic. Hair soap. Borley Rectory in Essex has been called the most haunted house in England. I think there is a sound scientific basis for that statement. No house in England is…
Core po-mo science studies professor says roughly "You don't get to choose your own reality and laypeople don't know better than scientific consensus about factual issues." Rode a Bombardier CRJ 900 from Copenhagen to Warsaw and then the competing model Embraer 170 from Warsaw to Munich. Five years ago I cut saplings and tree branches to give me a view from the kitchen window of Jrette in the playground. Now she's long past needing that kind of oversight and new saplings form a solid wall of greenery outside the window. My new project deals with early 20th century street lamps. I can debunk…
My buddy Anton dug for two summers at Denisova Cave during high school! Any Tolkien fan can tell you that orks are not safe to be with. That's why I'd never ever trust any of my coworkers around a dairy farm. Annoying how the liver, the spleen and the kidneys all do a bunch of functionally unrelated things. Sloppy design. Almost makes me doubt the Biblical creation narratives. Yay! Been asked to return for the third year running and teach landscape history to international exchange students in Växjö during September. Turns out archaeagenetics is not archaeogenetics. Who is that, playing jazz…
Learned a joke from a German on Twitter. It works in English as well. Q: What do you call a Nazi sitting on a high voltage cable? A: National resistance. Played "Hoochie Coochie Man" to Jrette to explain where the anonymous piano riff she uses as a ring tone comes from. And mightily did she groove to it. My wife asks me how come I'm familiar with a certain sociologist she's reading for her second degree. "Because I have annoying colleagues who cite sociologists needlessly all the time." When I copy or move information from one document to another, I usually put the goal document to the right…
The Christian Democrats dropping under the 4% cutoff for Parliament is a thing devoutly to be wished for in itself. But also, I just realised, if they do, then their votes will evaporate, losing the Right coalition a considerable part of their current majority. I feel really bad for people who don't know what CTRL-Z and ALT-Backspace does. Elsevier's manuscript submission site is old, creaky and slooow. TV chef reminds me that I like forehead, not fringe. Solsbury Hill that Peter Gabriel sang about has a big hillfort on top. This is pretty badass: a local amateur archaeology association has…
I want my spell-checker word list to reside in the cloud so that I won't have to start from scratch, adding names of Swedish provinces and archaeologists to the list, separately for each computer I work at. I'm tired of Star Trek and Star Wars. Let's forget about them. The Space Odyssey took place 13 years ago. I want new scifi! 2010s scifi. I ask this senior male scholar for the name of a qualified woman under 40 to review a book. He replies that there is none in his country. Hey man, at least you could have said ”I personally don’t know of such a person, but, you know, I’m getting old”.…
Swedish Mail's money transfer numbers usually have eight digits. My mother's number has four. This is because the account was originally opened by her grandfather in 1925, shortly after the service started. Kipling was quite conservative in many things, but still a recurrent theme in his short stories is a deep sympathy for women who have extra-marital affairs and children. I've become a 2010s computer user. I catch myself expecting screens to be touch screens. Would the scifi story mag Analog sell better if they renamed it Anal Log? Certain countries have their own sexual acts. And it struck…
How come we have any idea of the diameter of the Oort cloud? And how does it relate spatially to the Kuiper belt? Ridiculous tiny Mac keyboard. No F keys, no delete key, tiny cursor movement keys. Research is a pretty open-ended activity that demands a certain amount of creativity. Among the many advantages of my part-time editorial job are that I've got it almost entirely scripted, what I should do first is almost always clear and it demands no creativity whatsoever. Guaranteed productivity regardless of mood. Jrette asks me why Småland province, "Little Land", is actually extremely large…
Started reading Jacobsen's Midt i en klunketid, laughed helplessly on first page. Da. klunketiden literally means "the time of big tassels" and refers to a furnishing style of the 1880s and 90s. Dryden is hugely popular with badgers. It never ceases to annoy me that when application reviewers explain why they don't think I should have a certain job, they point out intentional characteristics of my work. Yes, thank you, I know that's what my work is like. I think everybody should be doing what I do. I have spent 20 years telling you that I think the stuff you're missing from my work is…
Listened to this guy on In Our Time who had a particularly unattractive verbal tick that I've come across now and then. When other people get a question and need to think before replying, they will go "errr", "well" etc. This guy sighed in a pained and exasperated way every time. I guess this really meant "It pains me that I don't have a very good answer to that question, I wish I knew better." But it came off as "It pains me that you ask me these stupid questions, you silly twat." Jrette asks her mother what the film Nymphomaniac is about. "It's about... a woman who is very fond of men." For…
Rare religion sighting: we put up two charming Iraqi ladies for the night because of a friend's birthday party, and they turned out to be Mandaeans, Gnostic believers in John the Baptist as Messiah. One of my best old friends calls me, grieving, and tells me his old roomie died this morning of cancer. Age 37, leaving a wife and two small kids. I'm glad I don't have to reconcile shit like this with any idea about a good lord directing things from behind the scenes. The universe isn't trying to please us or mess with us, it's just one big indifferent randomiser. Last night I went to bed early…
My wife and I were congratulating ourselves on how nicely we (unlike others) had cleaned up after our fireworks last night. Then we realised that actually, most of the contents of those fireworks packages we didn't clean up at all. We used rockets to shoot the stuff into the sky, later to land randomly on roofs, in trees and in people's yards where we will never even try to retrieve them. Gravity is highly recommended! And the coolest thing is that it isn't a scifi movie. It's a contemporary disaster movie about NASA astronauts with a strong female lead. The Queen should give an MBE to a male…
I wonder if Chuck Berry likes death metal. Windows 8 is amazingly bad. It's so complicated and sluggish that it has to display a progress bar when you delete or move a file locally. Interesting ethno-political misunderstanding, all my fault. Chinese Swedish dude says he doesn't like the traditional Swedish Christmas buffet. I agree with him, so I comment briefly that he should check if the restaurant has some good Chinese food instead. An on-looker interprets my comment to mean "Why don't you just go back to China if you hate our traditional culture so much". Student shows me the design he's…
Once when I was a kid I read in the paper that Elvis had stolen black people's music and sold it to the whites. What an incredibly racist perspective. Archaeologists have it easy at Hallowe'en parties. No need to dress up: just be a grave robber and come as you are. You know you're not a kid any more when your wife buys Bornholms Rugkiks crackers. Love the scent of bog myrtle and marsh Labrador tea, pors & skvattram. Let's all start pronouncing Asquith "ass queef". Correspondence analysis: Freudian therapy conducted by mail. Students demand that I teach them during the spring term as well…
From Current Archaeology #284: "The 'Great Hall' was entirely excavated in 2012, and represents one of the largest structures of its type". Cf. "Dr. Rundkvist belongs to one of the handsomest archaeologists in his generation." The reason that there are no Neanderthal sites in Sweden is apparently that the Romans never invaded the area. Guy two seats from me on plane was clearly very drunk and very afraid of flying. Complained loudly and moronically to his wife for entire hour-long flight. Sounded like mentally retarded 9-y-o. A character failing of mine is that when confronted with…
I put the business part of my electric shaver in methylated spirits for half an hour. Loads of organic gunk sloughed off of it. Now I know where half of my face has been all these years. Neighbour from Afghanistan describes his interpreter gig with refugee children & teens in Sweden. They're traumatised and violent towards each other and themselves. This portly middle-aged father of five comes once a week, cooks the kids food from the old country and has long talks with them in Dari and Pashtu. Afterwards they're calmer for a few days. I like my new life as an itinerant archaeology…
I'm not saying that my mind is particularly august. First Aid Kit rule. And are godless: "There's one life and it's this life and it's beautiful" After listening to Ken & Robin's latest podcast episode I did some reading on Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais. The mind boggles at the idea of a Medieval army lead by two violently delusional psychotics. Reading a book that shows its author, an American teacher of creative writing, to have a tenuous grasp on English. He writes shown for shone, immure for inure and lumpen for lumpy. Boo to his editor! For the first time in 30 years I've seen a…
Sad case in my municipality of date rape made worse by fathering fail. 20-y-o guy coerces 15-y-o girl to blow him by threatening to tell her dad they're together. Good dads are who you run to when somebody tries to blackmail you. A publicist offers me to review the latest in a popular series of detective novels (that I've never heard of) on my blog. I accept and receive an epub file. Then I realise that this is just an ebook reissue of a book from 1997. Not reviewing it. Michael Jackson didn't die. He just completed his transformation into a Deep One. Just look at the song lyric, "The girl is…
Wait a minute. Did I just win my first competition for an advertised teaching job? In ten years of applying for them? I kind of feel the bedrock under my feet slipping. A chapter of my life ended on 12 June. 13½ years ago I began taking my son to daycare. Ever since, I have taken my kids to daycare or school half of my mornings or, since Jrette showed up, more. In August she starts taking the commuter train to school. The Norwegian Archaeologists' Annual Meeting has two quotations at the top of this year's web site: one from Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley about how important…
Reading Kerstin Ekman I'm struck by how complicated a relationship her characters have to social class. And by how oblivious I have largely been to it through my life. I've always known that there are people with less money and power than my circle. And that there are those with more money and power. But me, I'm just comfortable in my middle-class geekiness, where what matters is neither money nor power, but being smart and well read. I don't care what your pay check looks like, I will still only really respect you if you have a vocabulary and can spell. I want a big fucking switch in Gmail…