June Pieces Of My Mind #2

• WTF! Ugly digital version of the wonderful claymation Shaun the Sheep! Curses!
• Top three Women As Sex Robots songs: Rollergirl: Superstar. Teddybears Sthlm: Yours To Keep. Kylie Minogue: Can’t Get You Out Of My Head.
• In the otherwise excellent boardgame Lords of Waterdeep there’s a quest called “Retrieve Ancient Artefacts”. Come on, do I really have to deal with work during game night too?
• Shampoo is hársápa in Icelandic. Hair soap.
• Borley Rectory in Essex has been called the most haunted house in England. I think there is a sound scientific basis for that statement. No house in England is haunted. This means that there is not one single building there that is more haunted than Borley Rectory, that truly horrific old pile.
• I helped a young woman with her shopping trolley down at the shops. She looked and dressed like she’d just gotten off the plane from Djibouti. But when she spoke it was pure Stockholm Swedish. On the phone I would have assumed that her name was Anna Larsson and that she was a blue-eyed blonde.
• I’ve had a really bad cold ever since I got back from Poland three weeks ago. The most annoying part right now is not being able to sense smells or taste anything beyond salt-sweet-bitter-hot. I tried eating some Pakistani mango, my favourite fruit, but had to give up. It just tasted like cucumber.
• While watching A Game of Thrones, my wife has increasingly come to exclaim stuff like “Oh no! No! Oh that’s so awful! Omigod!”
• Paracelsus was probably present at the Stockholm Blood Bath of 1520, as a surgeon for the Danish army.
• Historians of science keep saying stuff like “Yeah, well, what you find important about Newton’s work isn’t necessarily what he and his contemporaries found important”. But guess what. We’re not historians of science. We are not members of that tiny subset of humanity that finds Newton’s astrological speculations equally or more interesting than the Principia. The reason that we care about him at all is his contributions to natural science.
• Merihobu in Estonian, literally “sea horse”, means both seahorse and walrus.
• Håkan Håkansson writes that the unburied dead from a 1599 famine caused an epidemic. This was widely believed at the time but is not true. Most pathogens simply die when a body dies. The unburied dead smelled bad and that’s what people believed was the vector of contagion before bacteria and viruses were discovered.
• Short-tailed fledgling magpie pursues parent across lawn, complaining that it’s hungry.
• According to the Malleus Maleficarum, all intercourse between witches and demons is vaginal.
• Reading about the 1534 siege of Münster after the town was taken over by millennarian Anabaptists. It was Waco on a much larger scale.
• Junior called me yesterday and asked for the technical specs of our TV. I wonder if that was a teen celebration of Father’s Day.
• “I met a strange lady / She made me nervous / She took me in and gave me hickies”