May Pieces Of My Mind #1

• Learned a joke from a German on Twitter. It works in English as well. Q: What do you call a Nazi sitting on a high voltage cable? A: National resistance.
• Played “Hoochie Coochie Man” to Jrette to explain where the anonymous piano riff she uses as a ring tone comes from. And mightily did she groove to it.
• My wife asks me how come I’m familiar with a certain sociologist she’s reading for her second degree. “Because I have annoying colleagues who cite sociologists needlessly all the time.”
• When I copy or move information from one document to another, I usually put the goal document to the right on my screen.
• Guro Koksvik Lund in her MA thesis about my gaming group, no, sorry, about finds of boardgaming gear from Medieval Bergen: “Playing the games was an expression of leisure but perhaps also a way of expressing social and mental affiliation, and a way of distinguishing oneself in relation to others, and thus an indicator of social identity.”
• I complain a lot about not seeing a red career carpet rolled out in front of me. But really, I’m very pleased / grateful about how varied my work is. Right now I’m preparing a talk on how to analyse Late Iron Age burial data, while putting final touches to my Bronze Age book, and prepping for fieldwork on High Medieval castle ruins. Meanwhile, Academia.edu informs me that my most-downloaded paper there right now is the big one about 8th century jewellery.
• Staropramen means “the old spring” in Czech. I had to look it up on Wikipedia. My wife said, “Yeah, read the label, man”.
• I’m a pacifist without any particular interest in military history. But Dan Carlin has me listening to hour upon hour of lectures about the First World War.
• I wonder if anyone’s using the 80287 co-processor for anything these days.
• You can call me Quimby. You know, like Beyoncé.
• The latest few iterations of Mac OS interacts really, really poorly with DAV servers.
• I’m home and my shoes are still damp from Estonian rain. Air travel is strange.
• I’d like my camera to crank up the contrast for me. In the rare case where I wouldn’t want that, I could always crank it down afterwards.
• Turns out that Estonian õ, o with a tilde, is pronounced roughly like Turkish ı, i with no dot.
• I can get my sideburns symmetrical in relation to my facial hair OR in relation to the shape of my chin. Not both. I’m a freak.
• Oxenstierna is one of Sweden’s oldest and most illustrious noble families. The name originally meant “forehead of ox” and described their coat of arms. Now it strikes me that this is the same name as that of one of the bad guys in Scott’s “Ivanhoe”: Reginald Front de Boeuf.
• Woah. In an effort to combat the Japanese, Chiang Kai-shek had a river dam blown up, drowning half a million Chinese — more civilians than the Japanese murdered at Nanjing.
• Another crappy offer from a publishing company. They want a series editor for a line of Scandy archaeology books. The salary is €250 per published volume. I did some calculations starting from the OK but not exceptional salary I receive as editor of Fornvännen. It turns out that in order for this publishing company to pay me a similar rate for my time, I would be able to spend less than 11 hours on each book — including all the time spent on book projects that never make it into print. And as a friend pointed out, I shouldn’t even be comparing this to a salary. It’s a consultancy fee, where €250 is more like two hours. *sigh*
• Why can’t I solidify skin care products when Elizabeth Ardens Eight Hour Cream?
• Oh, those gay MLM spammers and their poncy schemes.
• The sexological definition of a paedophile is that they’re mainly and preferentially turned on by prepubescent kids. I was intrigued to learn from Little Atoms that most child molestors do not actually turn out to be paedophiles when investigated. They’re “opportunistic offenders”, men with drug habits or innately poor impulse control who’ll just grab and rape any easily subdued biped.
• So yeah, Tom Shippey quoted my latest book in The London Review of Books a few weeks ago.