Pieces of Mind
aardvarchaeology | March 21, 2017 In the foreground, a characteristic Swedish archaeological site of the 20th century: the abandoned municipal ski slope. Its construction, use and abandonment all post-date the still-in-use 1913 building in the background.
"Qualitative research" seems largely to mean "anecdotal material with no statistical representativity".
I'm starting a support group for people who think the novel American Gods is not great, not bad, not particularly memorable.
Woah-ho, dude. Lucid dreaming is when you train yourself to a) know that you're dreaming, b) direct events in the dream. This researcher has…
aardvarchaeology | March 14, 2017
A great thing about a cross-country skiing holiday is that you don't feel any obligation to make good use of the ski-lift money you've paid. Because you haven't.
Gene drives. Amazing, potentially scary piece of science news. Insert code to actively edit the next generation's genome into the current genome.
In order to comment on an article on Norwegian Broadcasting's web site, you first have to pass a test proving your comprehension of its contents.
Been listening to this excellent country tune, pondering the lyrics. The guy is hitch-hiking, standing at the roadside, praying to God that a…
aardvarchaeology | March 1, 2017
Couldn't quite catch a word in an old Blur song. Turned out to be "jumbojet" with the stress placed on the wrong syllable. JumBOjet. Grötrimslyriker, as we say in Swedish.
The Swedish Anti-Theft Association offers tags for keyrings. You put the tag on your keyring and pay an annual fee, and then if someone finds your keyring they can just drop it in a mailbox and the SATA will send it to you. But I've been wondering what happens if you don't pay the fee. So I asked. Turns out that the SATA periodically deletes the addresses of those who don't pay the fee. If they receive a keyring that…
aardvarchaeology | February 21, 2017
Nalin Pekgul: "Us Muslim immigrants used to invite Jehovah's Witnesses to practise our Swedish".
Movie: Sweden, Heaven and Hell. Hilariously over the top Italian exploitation mockumentary about late-60s Sweden that manages to tell volumes about Italy instead. Narration similar to the closing voice-over in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Relentless blonde breast flaunting throughout. Grade: Recommended.
Movie: The Danish Girl. Transgender journey in 1920s Copenhagen and Paris. Main character's self-absorption and sudden unwillingness to doink A. Vikander get kind of old. Grade: OK.
Imagine…
aardvarchaeology | February 10, 2017 Veneer inlay, Ewald Dahlskog, Stockholm's China Theatre.
Me and Cecilia von Heijne have just submitted our paper on the coins from Skällvik Castle to a numismatic journal. Yay!
Current Swedish Archaeology has just published my enthusiastic review of Cecilia Ljung's doctoral thesis on 11th century burial monuments. Well done, Doctor!
Danish is such a badass language. It's got words like skaktavlkvadre -- note the VLKV sequence there -- and then you just pronounce everything like you're extremely drunk.
I demand that everyone in Sweden pronounce "Skälboö" as if it were an English word:…
aardvarchaeology | February 3, 2017
Stockholm municipality's high school authority is running an ad on Fb saying "Do not enrol your kid in the science programme. Consider vocational programmes instead. Like the cook programme." Wtf?!
Ads for wristwatches. Guys, I have a mobile phone, OK?
I'm going to assume for the next few years that most Americans are basically like Ursula K. LeGuin and Jon Stewart.
I'm reading Dick's 1964 Three Stigmata. It isn't great, but it's exceptionally trippy / psychotic. Was there anything as strange around at that early date? Burroughs' Naked Lunch is from 1959, I guess.
Movie: The Whisperer in…
aardvarchaeology | January 20, 2017
I just wrote a long drinking song in Swedish for the Stockholm Tolkien Society's 5 x 9th anniversary. The first line translates to "Thranduil in Mirkwood imports beverages".
Like most archaeologists I use Academia.edu to share my work, but I have a somnolent placeholder account on ResearchGate as well. They keep pestering me to engage more. Just now they congratulated me on one of my books reaching 20 downloads there. Oh, hoo fucking ray.
Spent several days extracting find spots for some artefact categories from confused & sloppy documentation of a 1915 castle excavation. Got a really…
aardvarchaeology | January 9, 2017 We built a snow entity. I shall miss Cousin E.
Waiting to blow
The introductions to academic paper anthologies often consist of descriptions of the contents. I never read them. That information is in the title to each contribution. Pointless.
H.G. Wells became public domain on 1 January!
My new project is writing a Latin grammar in Pidgin English.
Have you ever been to a Yule Spruce Looting event?
The blotter pad at the bottom of a supermarket meat tray would probably work well as a wound dressing or a panty liner.
Be it known that I cooked 1/4 of a goose with wine, garlic, onions,…
aardvarchaeology | December 31, 2016
If you're a bricklayer with unusually high qualifications, being unemployed is frustrating. But very few customers in the construction business make any kind of public promise to always employ the most qualified bricklayer. Now imagine that they did. Imagine that it were illegal for builders to employ anyone but the most qualified bricklayer. And imagine our bricklayer's frustration when poorly qualified colleagues, who didn't even quote a lower price, got the jobs anyway. Imagine that. And welcome to academia.
Let's all refer to the 19th century historian C.G. Styffe as "Stiffie".
Much-…
aardvarchaeology | December 20, 2016
Would it be cruel and unusual to wake Cousin E with a rousing rendition of the Brigands' Song from the Ronja movie?
Went to the snow-covered golf course, sat down in the moon shadow of a spruce tree at the edge of the fairway, watched until I had seen three meteors, went home.
Place-name scholar Ann-Christin Mattisson 1986: "Our knowledge about the nobility's domestic architecture in the Middle Ages is ... limited, i.a. because too few sites have been excavated and dated, but also because the remains are often too insignificant to merit any more thorough investigation." (p. 25)
Movie:…
aardvarchaeology | December 10, 2016
OK so Google Inbox is excellent and I use it all the time. Takes so much of the stress out of e-mail. But I wonder, when are we getting Google Imbolc?
Hehe. This Swedish author intends to talk about the actions of the Medieval aristocracy, instead puts "their acting". And his language reviewer does nothing about it.
Story germ: we discover the existence of alien visitors when one is found as a piece of mangled, semi-decomposed roadkill on a major highway.
Google Maps knew that I was near Vienna. Then it got confused and teleported me to St. Pölten.
Yay Rausing Foundation! Now we'll see what…
aardvarchaeology | December 2, 2016
There was a major 19th century arts magazine titled Glissons, n'appuyons pas. This means "Let's glide, not support", that is, "Let's live an easy life without having to support ourselves". Opera reviews were a big thing in the mag.
Private parking is "idiot parking" in Greek, because here the word idiot means "private person". Our sense of the word comes from the ancient distinction between a skilled person who could take part in public affairs and an untrained one who was just himself, an idiot. The Greek word for the mentally challenged, meanwhile, is vlakas.
I saw an old high-wheel…
aardvarchaeology | November 21, 2016
Thanks to metal detecting, the 7th century material has exploded with duckbill brooches / næbfibler in Denmark and conical brooches in Norway. The making of every one of those brooches resulted in a pile of durable, easily identified mould fragments. Where are those? Ground up into grog / chamotte for new moulds?
Distinguished older Slavic construction worker on commuter train is annoyed on cellphone, says kurva at least once in every sentence.
I need to stop reading US news. It's sheer self-harm since I'm powerless to help.
Tea leaves flavoured with berries and cream. What is the substance…
aardvarchaeology | November 10, 2016 Tree-house ruin near the old chapel cemetery on Skogsö.
Fear me! I make bad puns in really, really bad Mandarin!
One Celsius and sleet. I have to drive for four hours today, so I'm switching tyres first.
Skänninge is dying. So many empty shop premises and housing properties. Facades flaking. Railway has cut off the eastern approaches to the town square. Last wave of investment in construction seems to have coincided with the mexibrick fad around 1970.
Incomprehensible: the re... play I guess? Of Toto's "Africa" with a few hip-hop passages inserted. Why oh why?
Why doesn't the Linköping…
aardvarchaeology | October 31, 2016
Leonard Cohen got from the used books store to the cake shop ahead of me. /-:
Wish somebody would demolish all the modern houses on top of the ruins of Visborg Castle.
The ruin of St. Olav's church in Visby is a protected ancient monument. It is being damaged by the ivy that covers it. Sadly the ivy is a protected plant.
Ny Björn points out something interesting about St. Olav's ruin in Visby and its super ivy. An important reason that the ruin and the ivy survive today is that both fit well with Romantic ideas about picturesque ruins. Thus they were both preserved, and both for the same…
aardvarchaeology | October 22, 2016
The New Dawn rose I've been pampering has almost outgrown its trellis.
Movie: Kubo and the Two Strings. Oddly titled Japanese fantasy story with beautiful imagery and sappy moral. Grade: Pass.
The UK imports roughly the same amount of tea annually as the rest of Europe combined.
About the Trump campaign's response to the "just grab her" clip: me and my nerdy buddies never had those misogynistic locker-room conversations even during our lower teens. Ridiculous of him to claim "all men".
In 1980 a lot of penpal ads in my kids' mag listed Jimi Hendrix as an idol. Mom and Dad's music...
When I…
aardvarchaeology | October 10, 2016 The New Dawn rose I've been pampering has almost outgrown its trellis.
Movie: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. Two film-making high school boys befriend a girl just as she is diagnosed with leukaemia. Grade: Pass With Distinction.
Heard this ad for contact lenses offering prices that are "up to 70% of what you usually pay". You may want to think that through again, guys.
Swedish Racist Party representative makes confused motion to Parliament about removing state subsidies from newspapers that don't actually have those subsidies, capping the percentage of the media that members of a given…
aardvarchaeology | September 30, 2016
Just got the application referees' evaluation for a job I've been hoping for. I'm afraid to read it. Taking a walk first.
I'm really tired of this thankless shit. Impatient for December, when I'll know if I'll have money to write that castles book or if I should start calling people about a steady job in contract archaeology. The one I stupidly turned down in fucking 1994.
Osteologist Rudolf Gustavsson has documented traces of flaying on cat bones that we've found at Stensö Castle. Reading the ribald 15th century "Marriage Song" that has just appeared in a new critical edition, I found a…
aardvarchaeology | September 20, 2016
The former school / functions venue in my housing area has been converted into housing for single male asylum seekers. I'm putting a note on their front door, offering to teach them some boardgames.
Wonder if the weight-loss advertisers realise that the pics of amply built women they intend to frighten female customers with are actually attractive to a bunch of dudes. They're basically providing free soft porn to a market segment who will never buy their product.
If I had to be a war vet, then I'd prefer to be one whose son wrote Alice in Chains's "Rooster" about him.
When I was a teen in…
aardvarchaeology | September 14, 2016
Learned a neat German expression: Eier kraulen, lit. "to fondle the eggs", means "to fondle someone's testicles", that is, "to stroke a man's ego".
Lithuanian plumbers put the hot water to the right even though the colour coding on the taps is the reverse.
This Romanian researcher thinks that the Yamnaya Culture is an ancient "people" that can be identified in graves by a combination of archaeological data, genetic markers and radiocarbon dates. This is backwards. The Yamnaya Culture is a modern analytical entity resting entirely on archaeological data. No genetic data can prove or disprove…