December Pieces Of My Mind #3

• If you’re a bricklayer with unusually high qualifications, being unemployed is frustrating. But very few customers in the construction business make any kind of public promise to always employ the most qualified bricklayer. Now imagine that they did. Imagine that it were illegal for builders to employ anyone but the most qualified bricklayer. And imagine our bricklayer’s frustration when poorly qualified colleagues, who didn’t even quote a lower price, got the jobs anyway. Imagine that. And welcome to academia.
• Let’s all refer to the 19th century historian C.G. Styffe as “Stiffie”.
• Much-needed encouragement: a colleague wrote me to ask if I would please do this small job that not many people have experience of, and also give a talk about some relevant work of mine to a crowd of contract archaeologists.
• Swedish mountains are kind of wimpy. Norway’s highest peak is almost 400 m higher than our highest one.
• Played Jeff Buckley’s recording of “Hallelujah” to Jrette and she put her head on my shoulder.
• Looking at the distribution of some find categories across the 14th century fortified manor Bjärkaholm. Documentation of where each individual find was made was completely ad hoc. No grid system. For find #405 for instance, a piece of Korsbetningen type lamellar armour, the find context is given as “Between the long cut. Near αα. 1914?”. *facepalm*
• The scenic yet inconveniently located Lännersta Inlet keeps me from taking a long walk northward from my home.
• Saw a teenage girl walking around outdoors while reading a 1980s copy of Ende’s Never-ending Story.
• I once met a weed-smoking Dutch lawyer with only one ball.
• My wife invited an Hazara tailor from Afghanistan and his family plus their interpreter friend over for lunch. Lovely people. Kids speak excellent Swedish. I taught them Pitch Car and Qwirkle. And I was particularly pleased to meet interpreter Ali again. He’s picked up Swedish in no time.
• The Swedish Skeptics are the subject of a long attack feature in the current issue of the country’s biggest extreme-right hate paper. We are all very proud!
• Dreamed that I had hair again. And that I parachuted into a city wearing only my dressing gown. When I landed I asked where I was. “Latvia”.
• Saw this ~28ish guy in elaborate punk costume on the train. His jacket celebrated the Swedish punk band Asta Kask whose first EP appeared in 1982. Under it he wore a G.G. Allin teeshirt (obiit 1993). How does a young man become a punk antiquary?
• Time spent doing research on tax-free funding cannot be discounted when the unemployment fund determines whether you have worked enough in the recent past to qualify for the dole. Time spent in forced treatment for drug addiction, however, is discounted.
• When you’re doing something fiddly with one hand and realise that you’re making some spazzy random gesture with the other. Embarrassing. (Yeah, yeah, nudge nudge etc.)
• This is really badass. I’ve never seen this before. A scientist has retracted a journal paper — not because of scientific fraud, but simply because continued research has disproven the paper’s main claim! Respect!
• So folks didn’t like 2016. Do we expect celebrity deaths and brown-shirted politics to respect the calendar year? Of course not.

Abandoned club house, Svartkärrsberget Hill