November Pieces Of My Mind #2

• Thanks to metal detecting, the 7th century material has exploded with duckbill brooches / næbfibler in Denmark and conical brooches in Norway. The making of every one of those brooches resulted in a pile of durable, easily identified mould fragments. Where are those? Ground up into grog / chamotte for new moulds?
• Distinguished older Slavic construction worker on commuter train is annoyed on cellphone, says kurva at least once in every sentence.
• I need to stop reading US news. It’s sheer self-harm since I’m powerless to help.
• Tea leaves flavoured with berries and cream. What is the substance that confers the aroma of cream? I hope they don’t pour cream onto the leaves. Anyway, I’ve never tried it.
• Playing the boardgame Detective & Co. Gameplay was somewhat confused. In this game you only know which colour belongs to you, and two players believed that they played orange.
• Odd expression in Planetary Report: “four times closer”. I conceptualise this as “one fourth of the distance”.
• I posted an annoyed note recently about people getting context numbers confused during excavations. Somebody commented “Oh how boring”. This somehow stuck with me. I’m tempted to reply “Well, I guess not all of us are mentally geared towards scientific exactitude”. But I won’t. Because it would be mean. And worse, most likely completely ineffective as an insult. Comparable to “I guess not all of us have a complete collection of the Swedish Ant Farm Association’s newsletter”.
• About the Mick Rock movie Shot. “I was lucky to shoot Bowie and Reed before they were really a big deal.” Maybe that should be “If I hadn’t shot Bowie and Reed at that time they would never have become such a big deal.”
• Kebab places are extremely reluctant to serve small helpings. They prefer to give me three times the food I want and a take-away box.
• Klavs Randsborg, dynamic Danish archaeology professor, died Saturday 12 November.
• WTF. Sponge cake as the basal layer of a cheesecake?!
• Some Roma beggars display religious effigies. I wonder if that really works in Sweden. To me they might as well heft a daikon radish.
• So weird when Adele Adkins (26) sings lyrics written from the perspective of a 50-y-o multiple divorcee.
• Just had to explain to a young scholar that when you submit a manuscript file to a journal, questions of font and type size are irrelevant. “You can submit in 35 p green Comic Sans if you like, it still only takes me 5 sec to change it to something I like better.”
• Heading for Kavalla and two weeks of reading & writing at the Swedish Institute. Screw you, Swedish November!
• Rode two Embraer 195s Stockholm – Vienna – Thessaloniki.
• The Kavallans are wearing sensible November clothes. Sensible that is if you’re in Stockholm. I’m walking around in just a shirt above my belt.
• Lunch: sardines cooked with onions, mustard and parsley. And a dish of oil-simmered horta greens. Only the absence of garum dates this meal after AD 400.
• I’m not a great tourist ambassador. I mainly take pictures of buildings in severe disrepair.
• The some-time live music bar was almost empty. Instead I found a recently opened boardgame café full of people. I had a cup of hazelnut cocoa, but I couldn’t find the courage to ask a bunch of young Greeks to play Saboteur with me. Next time I’ll be braver.
• I’m hiking the Water Trail north from Kavalla into the hills, on the conduit that fed the town’s aqueduct.
• I like the bedrock here. It’s gneiss like I’m used to, not some weird-ass recent sedimentary.
• Unripe olives taste really bad.
• The water conduit and aqueduct remained functional until WW2.
• Under Ottoman rule, the Christians of Kavalla were exempt from taxes in return for funding and organising upkeep of the water conduit. This involved a lot of chalk powder, linseed oil and cotton wool.

Kavalla’s Water Trail.