February Pieces Of My Mind #1

“That’s lovely sweetie, but can’t we just go to bed now and have a good fuck?” (Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm)

• I wonder what kind of event lead to entire 20-metre dinosaurs becoming fossilised as articulated skeletons.
• There’s been a lot of psychological research into the mental differences between conservatives and lefties. Chris Mooney’s The Republican Brain summarises it well up to 2012. And the refugee situation has really brought this out to me. I follow some conservatives here on Fb, and I happened to read an article in the Daily Torygraph yesterday. Many Conservatives truly believe that the arrival of large numbers of refugees in north-western Europe is an apocalyptic event. They really think it’s going to be Mad Max soon. The Torygraph speaks ominously of “the Great Migration”. These people are seriously, seriously scared.
• Jeanette Winterson believes in psychic mediums and is in contact with the ghost of Ruth Rendell.
• Having visited central Stockholm today, I’m pleased to be able to tell everyone that I saw no racist mobs, no sexual harassment and no police presence. Sweden’s societal structure shows no signs of failing.
• Talking to a Fb buddy about the problematic Swedish national identification with Vikings, I just coined a phrase. “What happens in Lindisfarne stays in Lindisfarne.” *smug*
• Anybody got access to advance articles in the European Journal of Archaeology? I’m really keen to read more than the first page of three in the third review of my latest book. The libraries I have logins for carry the journal but not advance articles.
• Second reviewer of my recent book ignores the results, mainly complains that I haven’t used his favourite method. I just wrote him and said “You’re right, it would be great to see what someone using your method might come up with about my sites. I’ll be happy to provide you and your students with data.”
• Bought fancy cocoa powder for the first time at the 100-y-o coffee & tea shop. It’s 7 times as expensive as standard grocery store stuff. But tastes way better!
• Spate of teen boy on teen boy rapes among Afghan asylum seekers in Sweden. It’s like they’ve grown up in, I don’t know, fucking Afghanistan or something. /-:
• I’m having tea and sandwiches for breakfast. It’s an act of Men’s Rights Activism. Tastes so good!
• A fossil is not a bone any more. Fossilisation is a slow geological process. There are no Homo sapiens fossils yet. There are no stegosaur bones any more. I wonder which hominin species is the oldest non-fossil one. It’s important for DNA purposes.
• Soap is made by treating fat with lye. The process also produces the alcohol glycerol, which softens the soap. During the use time of a large piece of soap, the glycerol gradually escapes and the soap goes hard. This is why the core of a once large soap is way less soapy than a new hotel soap of the same size. If you cut the core out of a new large piece of soap, it is just as soapy as a new hotel soap.
• Conflicting emotions on posh Strandvägen yesterday. Met a young man in an extreme upper class outfit, quilted green jacket, greased comb-back hairdo and all. I felt intertribal enmity and distrust. But he was pushing his baby buggy. So I also felt brotherly love.
• A reason to hate Google Docs: when you start it, it doesn’t pay attention to the keyboard queue. So when you hit CTRL-F to find something, you end up typing in your document instead of in a search box.
• Movie: The Hateful Eight. Grotesquely violent stage play where a stellar cast of major older film stars end up dead. Grade: Pass.
• It’s sooo painful when, in the middle of your usual stream of snark and obscure puns, some peripheral Fb contact posts a clichéd feelgood affirmation. And you can’t tell them they’re ridiculous because you don’t want to be mean.

Pueblo figurines, early 20th c. (Museum of Ethnography, Stockholm)