- Rare religion sighting: we put up two charming Iraqi ladies for the night because of a friend’s birthday party, and they turned out to be Mandaeans, Gnostic believers in John the Baptist as Messiah.
- One of my best old friends calls me, grieving, and tells me his old roomie died this morning of cancer. Age 37, leaving a wife and two small kids. I’m glad I don’t have to reconcile shit like this with any idea about a good lord directing things from behind the scenes. The universe isn’t trying to please us or mess with us, it’s just one big indifferent randomiser.
- Last night I went to bed early with a headache. This morning I awoke and it was still there. Who suffered my headache while I slept? Probably the guy who listens to trees that fall when nobody’s around.
- A Bronze Age axe hoard from the Sussex village of Sompting has lent its name to a type of axe, the “Sompting axe”. It sounds like an expletive to me. “Oh sompt! You sompter! I’m so Sompting tired of you and your Sompting axes!”
- When editing academic writing I sometimes come across people finding a piece of relevant 19th century academic writing and presenting this proudly as if they’ve made an important discovery. I always change this to a simple literature reference. Let’s just assume that all previous publications on your subject are part of the collective fund of knowledge.
- Blood oranges are way better than blood diamonds.
- Facebook is feverishly trying to find out what TV shows I like. It doesn’t seem to have an option for people who don’t watch TV at all.
- Calling an entry you made on your blog “a blog” is like calling an article “a newspaper” or a steering wheel “a car”.
- This is crap! Cold and dark and naked trees. Anyone can see that I should at this moment be watching a summer production of a Shakespeare comedy in the ruins of a Medieval church on Gotland, on a sunny July evening, after a good meal. Come on now!
- Preparing for this summer’s excavations of two small Medieval castle ruins near Norrköping with Christian. Funding: check. Student labour: check. County museum colleagues on board: check. Land owners on board: check. Housing for team at one site: check.
- Feels good to have a few less projects to juggle now that the Aska paper is in the can, the Linnaeus teaching is done and the Umeå teaching is almost done.
- The Ball-Tick states are named for a small mite-like creature that causes the men in the area no end of pain and irritation.
- A Chinese novel translator who shall not be named just informed me that “The monkeys stood there blinking with standing birds” should actually be understood as “The monkeys stood there blinking with erect penises”.
- “Money, money, money / Must be funny / In the Rickmansworth”
- A charming old lady who I got to know in the local historical society in the 90s has died. Her children are emailing the sad news to everybody the old lady corresponded with, using her own email account. Death customs of an on-line culture.
- “There is no pain, you are receding / A fish-and-chip shop on the horizon”
- Ikea now makes apartment building construction kits. They’re developing the vacant lot next to my block.
- Director of Stockholm Museum of Spirits (i.e. booze) responds to my criticism of an exhibition that promises to teach visitors about night clubs in Stockholm in the past 150 years but which starts its tale in 1970. Director blithely points out that in one room there is an 8-minute film loop that contains some material about certain decades before 1970. Oh right then.
- Looking through a new academic book on press history, my colleague found two footnotes that contained reciprocal referrals, meaning that the reader ends up in an infinite loop and can never finish the book.
- I just asked the Skype Test Call lady pantingly what she was wearing.
- Woman on bus says “Everything happens for a reason”. Now I don’t know if I should praise her causal-mechanist worldview or despise her new age worldview.
↧
January Pieces Of My Mind #2
↧