December Pieces Of My Mind #1

Middle Byzantine tomb portal slab in Thessaloniki’s Museum of Byzantine Culture.

• Cube sats are so tough that if their launch rocket blows up after lift-off and they fall to the ground, they usually still work.
• Cancelled flight leads to unscheduled layover, which knocks me so far out of my habits that I take a bath instead of a shower. Must be almost 20 years since the last time.
• Hotel rooms used to be so lonely. No more thanks to wifi and social media.
• One of the Viking town Kaupang’s cemeteries is named Bikkjeholberget, “Bitch Hole Hill”.
• I just found a Swedish example of the uncertainty of when to use “the” in English. Making the title of a much-read book by an archaeology professor read like something said by a Russian movie villain. Sorry, I mean, “Making title of mach-read book by archaeology prafessor read like something said by Rrraaassian movie villain.” In Saviet Rrrassia, you do not use word “the”. Word uses you!
• Even when they look amazing inside, Byzantine churches look awful from outside. Naked crumbling brickwork, usually sitting in a pit.
• Remember when a PC used to crash if you disconnected the keyboard?
• LibreOffice’s word processor has a tool button to set the colour of text. Its default colour isn’t black. It’s dried blood, caput mortuum.
• The question shouldn’t be “Is AI consciousness possible”, but “Are humans actually conscious or is it just what our brains think?”.
• Reading Taylor’s scifi novel We Are Legion and enjoying it immensely. But then there’s this Paleolithic culture on another planet. And the first person described is a woman who’s busy butchering an animal. That a male brought her, explains Taylor. Using a flint knife made by her son. And suddenly this future Stone Age looks quite Victorian.
• Another nibble! This one asked “Oh BTW, have you got a driver’s licence”?
• The Sites & Monuments Register inadvertently documents the decline of grazing in Södermanland province. Loads of ancient cemeteries are described in detail during the 60s, and then in the 80s the re-surveyors just comment “Overgrown, couldn’t see shit”.
• I have annoying Scanian ancestors. They use super few given names, so every time I think I’ve managed to link my genealogical tree up with somebody else’s it turns out to be different people with the same names. /-:
• A month working at this archive has led me to the realisation that I don’t own enough cardigans.
• When they cleared the ruin of Ärja parish’s Medieval church, they dumped the rubble on a Late Bronze Age cemetery nearby. :-0
• Reached the point where my kid does the baking for the school bake sale without me having to do anything, even find a recipe.
• The passing of a fad: you currently get two fidget spinners for the price of one on the Helsinki-Stockholm ferry.
• A new book tells the story of the British 80s magazine The Face, calling it a “style magazine”. I am relieved to finally understand why I found the mag completely pointless.
• This is a weird one. An Early Iron Age cemetery with the usual big flat round stone pavements — but one of them is built around a wellspring!
• There’s a 4 km corridor of international water between the Swedish islands of Öland and Gotland.
• The combination of darkness, a crowd and loud techno music really makes for a hellish environment.

Thessaloniki’s waterfront. Not a monochrome shot.