January 6, 2009
Category: Food
After my November talk at the County Museum in Linköping I was kindly presented with a copy of the third edition of Inga Wallenquists's book Östgötamat, "Östergötland Food". It's a beautifully illustrated coffee-table book combining recipes from the past three centuries with bits of regional kitchen history. The text is repetitive and should have been more stringently edited, but the contents are nonetheless interesting and inspiring. Excellent archival photos mingle with new ones by the masterly Göran Billesson.
I made Duchess Anna's cake (p. 59) on New Year's Eve, this being a variant on the Kronans kaka theme: ground almonds, lemon rind and a mashed potato, awesome. Yesterday I made boiled pretzels from Horn (p. 121), which are basically slightly sweet bagels: you fashion sweet yeast-based dough into pretzels, allow them to rise, boil them for 90 seconds and then bake them for 12 minutes. Lovely! Horn parish on Lake Åsunden is along with neighbouring Hycklinge one of the region's central areas in the 1st Millennium, though the hundred of Kinda was not at the time counted as part of Östergötland. My friend Mattias is from Kinda, which is kinda neat!
My next project will be Baron Adelswärd's sponge cake (p. 148) which intriguingly has potato starch instead of wheat flour. Gonna use Grand Marnier donated by Tor instead of the stipulated brandy, and leave out some of the sugar.
Posted by Martin R at 8:21 AM • 4 Comments
January 5, 2009
Category: Archaeology • Film
Back in July I panned the History Channel's documentary on the peopling of North America, Journey to 10,000 BC. Their publicist then sent me a recent re-issue of a 2005 film about adventurous archaeologists, The Real Tomb Hunters -- Snakes, Curses and Booby Traps. Here are my impressions of that picture.
Real Tomb Hunters, though not a very good documentary, is far better than Journey to 10,000 BC. This is because a) it doesn't rely on cheezy computer animation, b) it aims much lower, intending only to be exciting, not to present any research results or debates. We get to follow a number of archaeologists through the history of the discipline who have done adventurous fieldwork in exotic locales. (A palaeontologist is also slipped in without special comment. I guess a fossil bed is a kind of tomb if you're willing to stretch it...)
The film is good edutainment, but has a number of flaws. Most seriously, though the team has been able to travel around the world, they haven't had enough time on each location, so the same few clips are repeated endlessly and we get a lot of unprovenanced archive footage that also tends to get repeated. Every time the narrator mentions a snake we see the same clip.
Stylistically, the viewer soon tires of the ominous music that is constantly playing in the background, and the narrator sounds like he's trying to sell something rather than tell a story. In a documentary where almost all the talking heads are men, a female narrator would have provided balance.
For some rousing yarns about real archaeologists hacking through the jungle, crawling into ancient tombs and getting shot at by the militia, the film is not bad at all. But if your main interest is things that happened before about AD 1900, this film is not for you.
[More blog entries about film, documentary, archaeology, burial, indianajones, review; film, recension, arkeologi, gravar, indianajones.]
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 2 Comments
January 4, 2009
Category: NOIBN
Dear Reader, remember the remote-controlled Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity? How long is it since the last time you thought of them? Spirit landed on Mars five Earth years ago today, Opportunity on 25 January -- and both are still going strong! These machines were originally meant to work for three months, yet they continue to trundle around that cold, distant planet, taking pictures and analysing rocks. Check out the project's web site for news!
[More blog entries about astronomy, space, mars, nasa; astronomi, rymden, mars, nasa.]
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 2 Comments
January 3, 2009
Category: Archaeology • Blogging
The fifty-seventh Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Testimony of the Spade. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 28 January, weeks from now. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
Posted by Martin R at 7:35 AM • 0 Comments
January 2, 2009
Category: Homeownership • Introspection
The houses in our new neighbourhood are clones of one basic design: an L-shaped single-story structure with a fenced yard inside the angle of the L. The main entrance (1) is on one of the L's outer long walls. The grubby-boots entrance (2) is on the gable adjoining the wall with entrance 1. Finally, there's an entrance from the yard (3) which in many cases is fitted to be unlocked only from the inside: it's how the architect intended us to reach the yard from inside the house.
Our particular specimen of this design only has entrance 3, combining the functions of all three entrances from the original design. The house is sited in such a way that an entrance at 1 would have been inconvenient. Nor does there appear ever to have been an entrance A from that side of the house into the passage along that gable to the yard. We used to have an entrance 2, but the previous owner had it bricked up and instead installed a really glitzy bathroom in that corner of the building. So our house has kind of a strange layout: you have to enter the yard by the garden gate (B), and you have to enter the house right next to our dinner table (3). Then you have to cross the dining room to reach the coat hanger and the nearest toilet.
But I like to think that this freakish layout actually fits well at least with my own personality. When you enter my house for the first time, you will feel warmly welcomed into the heart of the place, and you will at the same time be a bit disorientated by its strangeness.
Posted by Martin R at 8:30 AM • 4 Comments
December 31, 2008
Category: Introspection
I have made peace with the passing of the 70s. I no longer feel that the 80s is the default present decade during which everything still happens. But let me tell you, Dear Reader, in my mind the 90s still lie mostly in the future. Windows 98 is a very new operating system. Nobody born in the 90s is able yet to walk or eat or use the potty unaided. I was really shocked when I realised that people born in the 80s were playing hockey and participating in porn.
And now there's only one year left of the Noughties. To me it's been a decade of fatherhood, of my second marriage, of PhD-hood, of site directorhood, of geocaching, and lately of blogging. And it's gone by fast.
What of the Teens? I'm gonna be a father of teens. A son of septuagenarians. A home owner. Hopefully a university teacher. And the top of my head will finally go bald. I wonder what the music of the Teens will be like? The movies, the science fiction? I'm looking forward to it all.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 10 Comments
December 30, 2008
Category: NOIBN
A house I have been asked to check in on over the holiday season was burgled last night along with two neighbouring houses. I've been on the phone to the police and the window repairman, and then I've been showing them around. My acquaintances had a burglary alarm system with motion detectors -- on the first and second floors. The burglars somehow scaled the wall to the third floor, broke open the window to a bedroom and went in. There they rifled through all cupboards, wardrobes and drawers, left a laptop computer and a TV untouched, opened a second window and nimbly jumped out. Looks like they spent maybe a quarter of an hour inside.
The police took this thing surprisingly seriously, cordoning off two rooms and calling in forensics. Apparently they have special funding to pursue home burglers. Anyway, I'm glad it wasn't in my area.
I wonder what makes a person a professional burglar. So do the criminologists, I guess.
Posted by Martin R at 8:16 AM • 11 Comments
December 29, 2008
Category: Blogging • Homeownership • Sweden • Tech
Today marks Aard's second anniversary. I'm still having fun and hope you are too! Looking at October and November, the blog had about 950 unique readers daily and was ranked #24 out of 74 blogs on Sb. I recently updated the Best of Aard page for those of you who want to check out some past goodies.
For much of these two years I have bragged in the left-hand side-bar that Aard had the highest Technorati rank among the net's archaeology blogs. This is no longer so, and the main reason is that I have stopped hosting blog carnivals. Technorati ranks a blog according to the number and quality of other blogs that have linked to it recently. When you host a carnival you can ask the participants to link to it, which boosts your Technorati ranking. But I got tired of carnival admin. The Technorati ranking says nothing directly about daily traffic, which continues to rise at a healthy clip.
As for life at Casa Rundkvist, we're still not on-line which is really a drag. This is the reason that posting here has been erratic lately and I have been absent from the comments sections of my favourite blogs. We received an ADSL modem today, but the people who wiggle the lines in the phone station have been off on holidays and so the DSL light on the modem stubbornly refuses to light up. Blogging from my mom's study, I can offer three pix of our surroundings, including the view from our kitchen window and the entrance to our yard.
Posted by Martin R at 10:42 AM • 6 Comments
December 28, 2008
Category: Film
John Ajvide Lindqvist's 2004 debut novel Låt den rätte komma in came as a pleasant surprise. From a stand-up comedian of respectable but unremarkable standing, suddenly we had this excellent vampire novel set in a staid Stockholm suburb in 1982 -- a time and a place I personally know quite well.
The novel is about adolescent friendship set against a thematic backdrop of forbidden thirst: the young vampire Eli craves blood, his paedophile handyman lusts for children, and the worn drunks upon whom they prey convene around their thirst for alcohol -- and friendship. There are a few scenes of horror-flick grotesquerie (when were you last attacked by a brain-dead paedophile vampire zombie, Dear Reader?), but all in all it is a novel of great finesse.
Of this fine book has now come a similary fine film, directed by Thomas Alfredsson using a script by Lindqvist himself. The photography is top tier, unabashedly arty, the pacing slow, the set design understated but solidly period. The weight of the film rests squarely on the shoulders of two fine young actors, though I was confused to find that one of them has had her lines dubbed by a third actor. This is a vampire movie in the style of Kay Pollak, gory and beautiful and sad, another step in the inexorable mainstreaming and artification of genre culture. Look for it at your art house, not at a gorefest convention.
Those into Swedish pop music will be intrigued to hear a previously unknown Gyllene Tider song of unmistakable early 80s vintage played in the film. As I understand things, what we are actually hearing is a new track recorded by Per Gessle (of Roxette fame) in pitch-perfect imitation of his old band!
Posted by Martin R at 3:59 PM • 5 Comments
Dr Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, public speaker, skeptic, atheist, lefty liberal, bookworm, and father of two.
