September Pieces Of My Mind #2

I’m a closeted boardgamer.

• Is the gents’ loo in the new Stonehenge visitors’ centre fitted with Aubrey holes?
• Heh. Here’s a nice piece of home-made Scandy English: “the people living in the castles would spend their days doing chores, quarrelling, sleeping and eating”. The author probably means that castle dwellers would often “quarrel” with attacking troops.
• The Kings of Leon have a very odd singer. I can’t decide if he’s interesting or just bad.
• Borrowed one of the more recent Pratchetts that I haven’t read yet. Realised that it’s about a quarter-century old.
• Twitter just suggested that I follow this guy who describes himself as “Archaeologist / Powerlifter / Ambassador for Viking Warrior Nutrition”. Yep.
• OK music lovers, check out this detail in “Whole Lotta Love”. Plant doesn’t come in on the beat with the chorus, “Y’ wanna whole lotta love”. He’s intentionally like a quarter beat late every time. Micro-syncopation, says my musicologist friend.
• Listening to the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” for the first time. Was convinced at first that it was a Soundtrack of Our Lives song that I’d forgotten about. Then the female background singer came in and it started sounding like Primal Scream. That’s what it means to establish a style, I guess.
• Both the drummer and the bass player for the Jimi Hendrix Experience died from alcoholism at about age 60. )-:
• Ran the roleplaying exercise about the ethics and urban planning issues around burial excavations again. This year the random number generator assigned the role of Satanists to a born-again Pentecostal student and a Muslim student. They thought it was a blast. (-;
• I don’t have impostor syndrome. That’s when you’re an expert at something but feel like a fraud. I’ve quite a realistic perspective on my strengths. But imagine being given a university course to teach, and it’s been conceived and prepared by someone else whose skill set has almost no overlap with yours…
• Elderly relative likes something I’ve written on-line, wants to share it on a web site for people with similar interests. Does not post a link to my piece: instead creates a PDF file containing my piece and has the keeper of the web site put the PDF in their repository. Um… Well… That works, I guess.
• I commute several 100 kms once a week to teach. This of course costs me money for air tickets, bus rides and hostel stays. And though I can get a lot of work done during the commute, it does cost me a certain amount of time = more money. But it also costs me considerable time = money spent in simply booking all the air tickets and hostel nights. So though the gross salary is fine, my net income ain’t.
• It’s Godt-haab. Not God-thaab. No sibilant there.
• Wife vacuumed a lot of spilled instant coffee pellets. Now the vacuum cleaner makes the house smell like stale coffee.