December Pieces of My Mind

Posted by Martin R on January 15, 2013
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Selected Facebook updates:

  • Dreamed that a podcaster had mixed ham, celery and rice crispies into my favorite tea leaves. Was very angry.

  • Green tea leaves accumulate in our house way faster than we use them. Bothers my logistics brain.
  • Misread a headline on a lady’s magazine. “A Retro-Style Wedding” became “A Hetero-Style Wedding”.
  • Genital lambada, Sw. könslambada. That’s what exceptionally witty Black Metal blogger Hatpastorn calls it.
  • I just realised that penguins are aquatic polar dinosaurs. Darwin FTW!
  • The Mandelbrot set has the nicest ass in all of mathematics.
  • Swedish internet users are stupid. Their most common searches are for Facebook, the Aftonbladet newspaper and Youtube. They don’t type this into the URL window of their browsers and click the popup URL. They search for these sites.
  • Why are the Swedish words for “the sweater” and “that damned pine cone” so similar?
  • “You’re very good in bed too. And above all, you’re very often in bed.”
  • The opening movement of Tubular Bells is in 15/8 time. You gotta love 70s music. Mike Oldfield was 19 when he recorded that album.
  • The hair at the small of my back is now way longer than the hair on my head has ever been.
  • I’m such a lapsed Tolkienian that I had to check Wikipedia for the name of Alatar the Blue Wizard. This reminds me of the day when I realised that I no longer remembered what songs are on Depeche Mode’s album Black Celebration.
  • Wife: “‘Ethiopian cooking sucks’, he said, adding insult to injera.”
  • In order to keep the allitteration, the Swedish title of The Wind in the Willows translates as “There Is A Soughing In The Rushes”.
  • I don’t understand the purpose of the little embarkation and disembarkation forms that certain countries make you fill out before passport control at airports. What’s their real purpose? Most of the information you just copy from your passport. (And let’s not even ponder why the US asks if I’m a terrorist and the People’s Republic of China asks if I’m psychotic.)
  • Egyptologists find it hard to distinguish between the erotic and the hieratic.
  • A man told me that he was a management consultant for a finance company. I didn’t know what either term meant.
  • My loose Moroccan change. Being an archaeologist I find it hard to throw coins into the trash. But I had an idea. I’m dropping them into the sandbox at the playground.
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Comments

  1. #1 Anders
    Stockholm
    January 15, 2013

    Typing “youtube funny kittens” directly in the browser’s URL field is way faster than going to youtube and then searching. Dunno if that kind of search is reflected in the referenced survey, of course.

  2. #2 Mu
    January 16, 2013

    The reason they make you fill out the form is that doing it wrong is a crime in itself. If you’re a Chechen terrorist but have not committed a crime in the or against a citizen of the US, they can still get you for lying on your form (or deport you right away if you don’t).

  3. #3 Birger Johansson
    January 16, 2013

    During a concert performing Oldfield’s Ommadawn, the sexist TV team concentrated on the good-looking female chorus singer and ignored the other one. Brits!

    -Since your kids are likely to reach 100 years (if the trends are correctly interpreted), they should keep those coins. In a century, everything made today can be sold to collectors for a profit.

  4. #4 Hawks
    January 16, 2013

    “Tröjan” is similar to “Den där jävla grankotten”?

  5. #5 Martin R
    January 16, 2013

    Mu, I’ve heard that explanation for the entry form, but what’s the point of the exit form?

    Birger, don’t forget the admin cost of storing, moving and keeping track of stuff for 90 years.

    Hawks, koftan.

  6. #6 Eric Lund
    January 16, 2013

    I suspect the entry/exit cards are a holdover from the days of paper records. The immigration authorities in any given country would want to know what foreigners are in the country, and when any particular foreigner has left the country. I’m not sure these forms make sense today, as there are now other ways they can easily obtain this information, but they would have made sense 20 years ago.

    @Birger: Old items like coins command value because of their relative rarity. They are easily lost or destroyed. If everybody saved their old coins, the coins would not be so valuable. (I say this as someone who has accumulated coins from various other countries, including several that are now on the Euro, in the course of my travels.)

  7. #7 Birger Johansson
    January 16, 2013

    Garnkofta? And don’t diss the hieratic variant of E. writing. It is almost as aestetically pleasing as Mayan glyphs. Add lard and shell-crushing teeth and you have polar mososaurs (yes, yes, another reptile group, I know).

  8. #8 dustbubble
    January 18, 2013

    I can see the headlines now
    “Playpark Sandpits Invaded by Crazed Metal-Detectorists”

    I chuck my worthless specie in any attractive spring or fountain. It’s a “celtic” thang maybe? .. heads are pretty much deprecated by the public health bods nowadays.

  9. #9 dustbubble
    January 18, 2013

    The tea leaves. Used or unused? And who is sending them?

  10. #10 dustbubble
    January 18, 2013

    I prefer Julia’s …

  11. #11 Martin R
    January 18, 2013

    The tea-leaves are unused. Every time a Chinese relative visits Sweden, and every time my wife visits them in China, we receive loads of tea. Which sits around and spoils unless we remember to give it away.

  12. #12 dustbubble
    Shangri-La
    January 19, 2013

    Arr I see. We have a Tibetan temple a couple of dales over, so the excess tea conundrum is solved by a dropoff, on the next trip to some dear friends who are, for reasons known only to themselves, religious maniacs of that persuasion (aka brain-fried hippies). Denial of fleshly temptations my arse. See Buddhists? See tea? Right buggers for it they are so.
    Owt’ll do, even Chinese, anything they can cram in the pot. Even my nearly shot (out of date) green gunpowder. It all gets shared out, in some sort of internal communism of blagged stuff, apparently.