Pieces of Mind
aardvarchaeology | August 31, 2016Today is the big book-selling festival on Drottninggatan in Stockholm, "the world's longest book table", which is probably true since the term "book table" is almost unknown outside Sweden. I'm bringing a backpack and the names Bengtsson, Bujold, LeGuin, Maugham, Paasilinna and Piraten.
Several book sellers at the festival have told me "He's great but nobody reads him any more" or "She's great so I'm certainly not selling those" when I've asked about my favourites.
I'm really interested in new ideas and methods in my discipline. But it annoys the hell out of me that what we mainly get is new…
aardvarchaeology | August 20, 2016Getting your fridge filled with rusty Medieval nails isn't actually as hard as many people think. Just marry an archaeologist!
It's been decided that from now on the word is pronounced ever-yone or ever-yawn.
Jrette joined me and Lasse for tonight's sailing mini-race. She steered throughout the race, she enjoyed herself and we finished in the middle third as usual.
Cousin E admires Newton and Turing. I've lent him Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.
I run an academic job application web site through Google Translate. The gender box asks whether I am a human or a woman.
The stereotype of the sandal-…
aardvarchaeology | August 11, 2016I just meta-mimed singing into my electric shaver. I wasn't miming singing. I was miming someone in a movie who mimes singing.
Family spooked at one in the morning because a burst of engine noise has been heard. Have burglars arrived at the island? Nope, no strange boat at the dock. Investigation reveals that Jrette has just pulled down the wobbly 80s roller blind in her bedroom: duggah duggah duggah. Oh well, we got to see the Milky Way and several meteors.
Bon Iver's song "Re: Stacks" name-checks the Dead Sea Scrolls. Folkies in the library basement!
Scored some chocolate from Jrette's…
aardvarchaeology | August 1, 2016Excavation finished, team scattered. Now for three weeks' vacation!
This Walter Jon Williams story has two Andean pan pipe bands and a Californian figure swimming troupe that all operate as secret intelligence agents.
Interesting jetsam around the shores of the island today. The flip-flop was pretty good. But the rifled camera bag was exceptional. It contained only a wallet, a little fabric case and a blister pack for hypertension medication, all empty. But the case is branded for a camera dealer in Busan, South Korea.
I like cormorants. In fact, I think it's more important that cormorants do…
aardvarchaeology | July 21, 2016Stoner dude got kicked out of our Christian abstainer hostel for eating our food and waddling around baked out of his noggin. And we found half of the bikini.
A good thing about never having been in particularly great physical shape is that you don't really notice becoming middle-aged.
Stoner dude refers to excavation team's black metal bass player Mats as "the Rasta guy with the camo pants", achieves instant immortality.
It took the addition of Pokémon to make geocaching a majority concern, 16 years after the fact.
Oh for fuck's sake, Swedish Peace & Arbitration Society. You've got a…
aardvarchaeology | July 13, 2016 Stegeborg Castle seen from our hostel.
Had dinner in Ryd shopping centre outside Linköping. My falafel came covered in this shocking purplish pink sauce. I said, "Oh my, what sauce is this!?" Replied the waiter, "It's pink sauce". (Turned out to be the standard white garlic sauce with colouring, possibly beetroot brine.)
Movie: Ant-man. Superhero action comedy. Grade: Pass. Jrette liked it.
I just told the borrowed cat, "You, Sir, are small, hairy and quadrupedal".
If you don't like traffic jams, the Södertälje motorway bridge is currently only open in the northward direction. For this…
aardvarchaeology | July 4, 2016This is the time of year when our yard becomes an extra room in our house. Where a man might sit around butt naked except for a straw hat, reading. I mean he really could. If he wanted to. You'll notice I'm not appending a selfie.
Anybody into Ariel Pink? Seems to be a true original. His 2014 song "Dayzed Inn Daydreams" has the weirdest Motown interlude in the middle.
I never understood, growing up, that democracy means that you run a constant risk of being governed by assholes on the strength of votes by the ignorant, hateful and scared.
Wife's workout app tells her "keep your abs tight". I…
aardvarchaeology | June 20, 2016 Nyckelviken's folly
Dropping off Jrette at sailing camp for her 2nd summer. Just like her brother in '09. Just like me in '86.
Heard new interviews with Andy Weir and Larry Niven on Planetary Radio. I love the Internet!
Kelley Johnston on self-defense training for daughters: "I'd rather bail you out of jail than identify you at the morgue".
Depeche Mode's 1984 Some Great Reward was the first album I bought. I just listened to "Blasphemous Rumours" for the first time in decades and was impressed.
Starting from the lines "Taken away to the dark side / I wanna be your left hand man", I began…
aardvarchaeology | June 11, 2016One of the synths on Gentle Giant's "The Boys In The Band" sounds like mp3 glitches.
Very soon my commuter train will enter a many-years-long period of refurbishment chaos. It's going to be a hassle. But I just feel excited about it. Something new along some of the most well-trodden and least pretty paths of my life!
A film studies professor once told me that prior to the VCR, a lot of the basic data presented in published research in her field was simply wrong. It was really hard for scholars to rewatch and pause movies. Like studying frogs and only being able to glimpse one a few times a…
aardvarchaeology | June 6, 2016This writer knows what glass cutters are for but doesn't know what they look like. She's having somebody behead plastic dolls with one.
You know suits of armour? Almost all are Early Modern LARPing costumes for festive tournaments. Not Medieval, not used in battle.
Not having any teaching gig this semester is straining my finances. But I also miss belonging. Really enjoyed lunch & afternoon snack with colleagues at the Swedish History Museum today as I was there to look at finds.
Trying something I should probably have done many years ago: looking at a form letter when writing a job…
aardvarchaeology | May 23, 2016 Doesn't this picture of Västra Eneby church's body storage shed in winter put you in a festive mood? Party. Party. Par. Taaaay.
My selective breeding programme for a future master race is producing good results. Jrette just beat her entire class (admittedly, a class selected for musical ability) at the national maths test. Meanwhile her brother is using seven programming languages while his classmates are learning one.
Have you heard Clint Eisteddfod's new album, Good, Bad and Ugly Songs?
A bright former student of mine has made a narrow escape from the archaeological job market. Phew! And…
aardvarchaeology | May 12, 2016Unpleasant discovery. I've known for a long time that looking at the age of people who get lectureships in Scandy archaeology, the third quartile is at 46. In other words, 75% of all the jobs are given to people aged 46 or less. But now I've looked at the contents of the fourth quartile. And it consists almost entirely of the value 46. In fact, I know of only one case where someone older than 46 got a job, and that was a short part-time temp job. Well, at least this gives me a definite date for when I can finally quit reading the damn job ads.
Senior archaeologist calls lo-tech traditional…
aardvarchaeology | May 3, 2016Happy archaeo-dad pastime: Jrette helped me enter the humongous tables of stats on rock art from Mats Malmer's 1981 book into a computer spreadsheet, and we checked his sums, finding them all to be correct.
Funny how common it is even for educated people to believe that the Vikings would send their dead out to sea in a (sometimes burning) boat. Have they never considered what would happen two hours later when the boat landed on the other side of the fjord?
I'm measuring stuff on my computer screen with a ruler to get the relative scales right on two shots of an ard tip.
Trying to convince…
aardvarchaeology | April 20, 2016Is there any HBTQ aware research in heterocyclic chemistry?
I don't like goat's cheese. As far as I'm concerned the goats could just stop making it.
Josh Homme always impresses me.
Ticking boxes for the upcoming fieldwork season, feels good. Landowners at two high-profile sites have given their permission. Both permit applications sent to the County Museum for checking prior to their submission to the County Archaeologist. Housing for the team booked at one site, and I have a good lead on housing at the other site too. Archive reports on last year's fieldwork almost done.
This pea soup has…
aardvarchaeology | April 13, 2016Slussen, "the Lock", an enormous 1930s concrete structure built to organise an 8-way road crossing in central Stockholm, is headed for replacement and the really big demolition bout is drawing near. Exciting! And an opportunity for looooads of really interesting urban contract archaeology!
In Chrétien de Troyes' Yvain, the hero goes nuts and an hermit prays for his soul. In the Old Swedish translation, the hermit instead prays that Yvain will never bother him again.
Haha, fucking Swedes. Dude publishes an interesting paper in good English, except he consistently puts "even" when he means "…
aardvarchaeology | March 31, 2016 Investigated a midden on the commuter train as I went into town for a doom metal gig.
Untouched WW2 resistance arms cache found in a cave near Bergen. Sadly no archaeological involvement. Everything dealt with by police explosives experts.
Greek Western heroine: Kalamata Jane.
So annoying when people write about patently incorrect beliefs held in the past or in far parts of the world as "knowledge".
They're going to drill cores of the limestone that fills the dino killer crater and look at what happened after the impact.
A car is a device that allows you to charge your phone using…
aardvarchaeology | March 21, 2016Pretty groovy example of restaurant spelling the other day: "A là cartè".
”From what black wells of Acherontic fear or feeling, from what unplumbed gulfs of extra-cosmic consciousness or obscure, long-latent heredity, were those half-articulate thunder-croakings drawn?”
I know I've said this before, but it is such a remarkable fact that it bears repeating. Dungeons & Dragons was designed by two members of Jehovah's Witnesses.
In library catalogues, books are sometimes categorised as "diss". It means that the librarians don't like them and you probably shouldn't read them.
Had a chat with…
aardvarchaeology | March 10, 2016 Joan Crawford representing America on one of the four main doors to the Grand movie theatre in Stockholm.
If you block the Autobahn with droves of bananas, is that then ein Obstruktion?
Tim Minchin has a huge hit right now in Australia with a song urging a strangely reluctant cardinal to come home from the Vatican and answer some questions about the clergy's crimes against children in the 70s and 80s.
Enormous areas in Scandinavia don't seem to have been completely messed up by the inland ice! If we have any Neanderthal sites, then that's where they are.
Such an amazing night for…
aardvarchaeology | February 22, 2016 The 1844 bridal chest that my great granddad donated to the Nordic Museum in 1940.
I've decided that although immigration and refugees are important political issues, I've been reading too much about them lately. Redistribution of wealth and flattening the pyramid is even more important. Because wealth equals power.
I don't give a damn about the US primaries.
A brother of Queen Euphemia of Norway was Bishop of Cammin, whose cathedral is famous for a Danish casket from about AD 1000, decorated with Mammen style animal art.
The surname Garfunkel means "carbuncle, garnet" and is thus…
aardvarchaeology | February 11, 2016 "That's lovely sweetie, but can't we just go to bed now and have a good fuck?" (Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm)
I wonder what kind of event lead to entire 20-metre dinosaurs becoming fossilised as articulated skeletons.
There's been a lot of psychological research into the mental differences between conservatives and lefties. Chris Mooney's The Republican Brain summarises it well up to 2012. And the refugee situation has really brought this out to me. I follow some conservatives here on Fb, and I happened to read an article in the Daily Torygraph yesterday. Many Conservatives truly…