July Pieces Of My Mind

  • 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 mine / That Dagon girl is mine".
  • You know your geek ghetto has become mainstreamed and gentrified when the Royal Dramatic Theatre puts on a youth musical called Necronomicon.
  • Retractionwatch doesn't mention archaeology. Wonder if any paper in my discipline has been retracted.
  • My wife's excellent tiramisù makes me suspect that she is secretly Italian. But her inability to enjoy said tiramisù suggests that she's probably Chinese after all.
  • Reading Saki, so cruel and elegant and funny, I just found myself compelled to read "The Secret Sin Of Septimus Brope" out loud to myself.
  • It's quite odd and eye-opening to be reading stories by Somerset Maugham in parallel with coeval stories by Lovecraft, let me tell you...
  • Register now for the 15th European Skeptics Conference!
  • I'm designing a game about diabolical cauldron makers: Kettlers of Satan.
  • Old Älvsborg castle fell twice to the Danes and had to be bought back at great expense to the tax payers. It's not being kept very well. Turns out it's quite near the Sandarna culture's eponym site.
  • The etymology of "session" is "sitting". Cf. "sessile".
  • For the past quarter century, the only conflicts involving naval battle have been those between a) the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers, and b) the two Koreas. No European navy has seen battle since the UK skirmished with Argentina at the Falklands in 1982.
  • Mascarpone is fine, but isn't it time for mascarptwo now?
  • Can't believe LibreOffice still has that old bug where it tries and fails to reconstruct deleted files on startup.
  • Hehe. The National Heritage Board HR dept thinks DAP means "digital archaeological process". Hehe.
  • I found Lovecraft's story "The Lurking Fear" really lame as a teen. Now I've re-read it and I still do.
  • Lafcadio Hearn refers to Shinto as "the elder gods" in relation to Buddhism.
  • I'm in a writing frenzy on my Bronze Age project. Love it!

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    One of the infinite number of reasons why Chinese wives are so loveable is that they keep making you brilliant stuff that they can't eat themselves.

    By John Massey (not verified) on 31 Jul 2013 #permalink

    Round here the Kettlers of Satan are also known as the Metropolitan Police, a notorious urban gang.

    By dustbubble (not verified) on 31 Jul 2013 #permalink

    I think that the thoughtful sort of soldier spends a lot of time fretting that they don't actually know what would happen when two navies, air forces, or mechanized armies with modern kit fought each other. This is a good thing (modern warfare is nasty!) but it makes the few wars between modern militaries which might happen even more unpredictable. It also bothers wargamers!

    Sean, that is actually the premise for Stanislaw Lem's novel "Peace On Earth".
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    The 20-y-old is in violation of the law, regardless of wether sex was consentual or not.
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    Didn't celtic mythology feature magic kettles that allowed the owner to feed the whole tribe?

    By Birger Johansson (not verified) on 01 Aug 2013 #permalink

    Age of consent is 15 in Sweden.

    I've only heard of Celtic cauldrons that revived slain warriors.

    Some papers must have been withdrawn as a result of the Japanese Palaeolithic fraud (planting of stone tools at sites with Palaeolithic period geological deposits) perpetrated by Fujimura Shinichi.

    By Nick Thorpe (not verified) on 01 Aug 2013 #permalink

    You're right, but they aren't on Retraction Watch. Probably because that scandal was cleaned up before the blog started.

    Kettlers n. (British slang, 2010s): people who "kettle" demonstrators by surrounding them and preventing anyone from entering or leaving.

    A bit closer to you than Japan, the fraudulent radiocarbon 'dates' produced for human remains by Reiner Protsch at the Frankfurt laboratory should have been retracted. I just looked at one of his date-lists on the web-site of the journal Radiocarbon and it doesn't indicate that there was any problem with the lab's work.

    By Nick Thorpe (not verified) on 03 Aug 2013 #permalink

    The date rape case reminds me of Aarfy from Catch-22. Aarfy never paid for it in his life, but the book mentions an incident where he and his fraternity brothers used a similar trick to get a couple of underaged girls to have sex with them. SPOILER ALERT (disemvoweled): h ltr rps nd mrdrs a wmn n Rm.

    By Eric Lund (not verified) on 05 Aug 2013 #permalink