January Pieces Of My Mind #2

• Me & Jrette just sat in deck chairs and took turns watching comet Lovejoy through hand binoculars. The nucleus is like a big pale fuzzy blob among the stars. Start from the Pleiades, which are gorgeous in simple binoculars, and move about 10 Pleiades diameters in the 4 o’clock direction to find the comet. Last time I saw a comet was in 1996, Hyakutake.
• Movie: Birdman. Possibly psychotic former action movie star puts on Broadway play. Grade: pass.
• My ex’s winter swimming buddy lost her gold chain on the beach yesterday. It was a recent gift from her hubbie and she hadn’t told him. I lent her my metal detector (since I can’t risk using it without a permit) and taught her a few basics about how it works. She found the chain swiftly and came back happy.
• Victory! Jrette and I tried another dojo, this one with kung fu, and she loved it. “So, I’m a martial arts girl now.”
• You know you’re pretty hot shit in archaeology when you get international spam phone calls from radiocarbon labs.
• I’m thinking of writing this retro-futuristic techno thriller where the US manages to put people on the Moon using only 1960s technology, former Nazi rocket scientists etc.
• Somebody thinks Shelob is in The Hobbit. It’s either Pat Cadigan or this character in her 2014 story “Report Concerning” etc.
• The designer sent me mockups of my Bronze Age book today. Looking great!
• Writing grant application, surfing a big warm wave of delusions of grandeur.
• Chinese novel: a guy with a speech impediment. In alphabetical writing, this can easily be shown in the spelling. “Ah don’ know ha’ menne ca’s of bea’s dere a’ in de cubba'” But in Chinese, you have to swap out characters to portray his speech, which is the equivalent of swapping out entire words or half-words. Incomprehensible.
• The historians and archaeologists who are currently at the age and seniority level where they can command major research funding were formed in their thinking by the post-modernism of the 90s. And so we get a huge EU research programme on meta-studies: “Uses of the Past”. *facepalm*
• I like this sweet oat muesli cereal known as “crunchy muesli” in Swedish grocery stores. I call it “cookie crumbs”, because I’ve long suspected that that’s pretty much what it is. I just checked the kcal figures. Crunchy muesli is 460 kcal/100 g. Oat biscuits, meant to be eaten like two at a time with a cup of coffee, are 520.
• Jrette just used the expression “lingonberry week” about one of her buddies. Picked it up from a young woman’s vlog on YouTube, apparently.
• Ordered a new safety valve for my childhood model steam engine. It’s been quiet for too long, since Jrette was tiny.
• I heard Johann Hari on Little Atoms. He gave an interesting explanation for why Mexican drug cartels commit such insane acts of torture and murder. It’s not because they are all psychotic serial killers. It’s all fairly rational. The only way to stay in business without getting attacked and taken down by other cartels is to scare the others and show that you’re capable of anything. This leads to an arms race where you periodically have to come up with something even sicker than the sickest thing one of your competitors has recently done.
• Thanks to an educated public and a small financial incentive, organic food waste separation and collection for microbial methane production is booming in my area.
• *teacher bragging* I kind of expected last year’s freshmen to want to join my dig this summer. But the previous year is also volunteering, the ones I dug with last summer. In fact, every single one of those is volunteering.
• Liszt’s “Liebestraum” was published as “Wet Dream” in the US.
• Why does Yoko Ono keep moaning “Datt-uh, datt-uh” on that orgasm song?
• I need somebody to hack Google Docs’ spreadsheet app for me and change the menu headline “add-ons” to “strap-ons”.
• My smartphone is a bad alarm clock. At midnight it goes GABLOINGGG to tell me that I have stuff scheduled for the new day that technically starts then. My previous one also went MÖÖÖP when the battery got fully charged during the night.
• Swapped two card games I’d tired of for Saboteur (2004) and Province (2014).
• The Swedish Research Council’s newsletter is headed “Do you dare to express your opinions in academia?”. Yes. Yes I do.
• Before submitting my habilitation application, I’m going to run it though the Skolt Saami spell checker and accept all suggestions for corrections.
• Turns out there’s a direct bus from the astrophysics thesis presentation to the tea-scones-lecture on prostitution in Early Modern Stockholm at the Vasa warship museum. Living the dream.
• Record attendance at the public tea talk about Stockholm’s prostitutes of the past. Almost entirely women. And me.
• *bleagh* Someone’s cleaned my phone charger cable with denatured alcohol, I realised when I needed to free a hand and put the cable between my teeth.