February Pieces Of My Mind #2

• I thought my pet was a meerkat, but it was in fact a mere cat.
• Movie: Wild Tales. A collection of unconnected short wry films about revenge. Grade: pass.
• Eagle-eyed Roger Wikell found something that looked like a duplicate entry in my database. A flanged axe found at Vappeby hamlet by someone named Winberg, and a flat axe found at Väppeby hamlet by someone named Vinberg. Turns out they are different axes found by different people, one at Vappeby in Torstuna parish and one at Väppeby in Kalmar parish. Phew!
• Reading Stanislaw Lem’s 1959 novel Eden. His big point is that aliens, their structures and their tech are incomprehensible. Sadly Lem makes it pretty clear that he doesn’t know either what all the weird shit he describes is or does. Endless descriptions of stuff that might as well be abstract sculpture. Yawn.
• My social anthropology thesis will deal with gendered behaviour among staff and customers at building supply stores.
• Jrette faces a history test. Mom & Dad help her study. Both aced high school history. They’re friends with both authors of Jrette’s textbook. The celeb historian in the teaching videos shown to the class is a work acquaintance of Dad’s. Class society perpetuated.
• I have attended to the Rundkvist family’s main outstanding administrative task. I went to the Sibyl’s coffee/tea shop and consolidated our customer loyalty stamps. We now only have one stamp card instead of five. Peace.
• Dear Anglophone scientists, stop prefacing your replies to interview questions with “so”. It makes no sense.
• Realised: the Russians’ 1719 torching of the Swedish East Coast was politically analogous to the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
• Preparing to dredge sediments full of industrial contaminants from the bottom of the Valdemarsvik inlet, divers found a train car that had gone off the rails at the silo on the dock.
• Watched a 5-y-o girl with Williams syndrome lovebomb strangers on the train. Very sweet. “Oh! I like YOU! Eeeeeeek! Your hair! Eeeeep!”
• Poofreading: literary analysis from a queer perspective.
• Laul & Valk’s 2007 book Siksälä : a community at the frontiers : Iron age and medieval has a chapter on craniology and ethnic attribution. Errr…
• Having broken a mirror, Reginald popped wood to counter bad luck.
• Autocorrect informs me that the English equivalent of Sw. morgonrock, “dressing gown”, is Mytholmroyd.
• Loving your country is a 19th century notion. Love the world and humanity!
• I sometimes wonder if I’m the father that gets briefly described at the start of a celebrity biography.
• I want an edition of the writings on the paper stuffed inside the mummified monk.
• Reading an article in the local paper about egg dishes I was impressed by the wording and factual accuracy regarding Chinese Thousand Year Eggs. In fact, the passage sounded strangely familiar. Turns out I wrote it on Wikipedia and the journalist copied it.
• Jrette has picked up from the net that nail varnish dries faster if you dip your nails into cold water. Her wording: “It solidifies faster”. This strikes me as a misunderstanding of how nail varnish dries. It’s simply a question of the solvent evaporating, not of temperature. Add solvent a day later and the varnish becomes liquid again. The water shouldn’t do anything at all. Or does the solvent diffuse into the water faster than it evaporates into the air?
• “Kokomo” from 1988 had no input from Brian Wilson and is widely seen as the Beach Boys’ least edgy, least innovative, least respected hit. Still it’s the only one I can think of whose lyrics references drugs.
• I like Google Inbox’s new single-click “make this email invisible until after office hours” button.
• Magpie making fluting lovey noises and messing around with an old nest.
• Some website said that Melvyn Bragg would be discussing the history of Unix on In Our Time. Turns out it’s actually eunuchs.
• The Danish village name Møgeltønder doesn’t mean “Mouldy Barrels” as it looks to a Swede. It means Mickle (i.e. big) Tønder, and refers to a nearby town that was once smaller. And Tønder is originally a common pan-Scandy stream name cognate with Eng. tinder and Sw. tindra, meaning “sparkling, glinting”.
• Movie: The Imitation Game. Alan Turing biopic. Grade: pass.