- Movie: Léon (1994). Lonely contract killer is adopted by an orphaned tweenie girl and together they fight absurdly crooked DEA policemen. Portman, Réno and Oldman all in excellent shape. Grade: good!
- Musical project: record a bunch of catchy pop tunes 1/3 note off key, so that they work internally but are impossible to play along to with standard tuning. Also would drive people with absolute pitch nuts.
- “Withdrawing the whip is one of the most severe punishments a party can dole out on one of their MPs.” Is the Westminster Parliament a BDSM club?!
- One consolation when we look at the political dung heaps currently governing the US and the UK is that in the long run, this has to hurt these countries’ major conservative parties really badly.
- Sudden insight: a rocket is a flying cannon firing continuously at the ground.
- The Medieval Stockholm Museum and the Söderköping book store have both sold out of my castles book and ordered more.
- My first year on the district court went OK, and now I’ve been put forward along with eleven other local Labour Party members to stay on for four more years.
- You’re starting a chain of sports bars in Sweden and you can only afford one apostrophe. Where do you put it? The founders of “O’Learys” chose not to have a genitive.
- I keep typing “centiry”. This is a major annoyance to an archaeologist and moonlight historian.
- Movie: Edge of Tomorrow (2014). “Groundhog Day” with lots of fighting against aliens and a ridiculous scifi rationale for the repetitiveness. Grade: OK.
- One of the Swedish language’s oddities is that we have no general equivalent of the verb “to put” in the standard dialect. Instead we have a group of specialised verbs that must be told apart. To put something so that it stands up. To put something so that it lies down. To pour something. To affix something.
- Finally discovered a way to beat my friend Maria at boardgames. While you play a game with her and converse in English, you also make her play a different game with her daughter while conversing in Russian.
- Being employed at less than full time means that you can head into the Södermanland woods on a Monday to sleep in a hiking shack and read weird fiction on your kindle.
Aardvarchaeology - by Dr. Martin Rundkvist 
You’re on the district court? Are you a judge?
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Sort of. A layman judge, there to represent the people. It’s like being a member of a very small jury. There’s one real educated judge and three laymen. In my first year all our verdicts have been unanimous.
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A similar system exists in Germany, but only for low-level courts (probably the same in Sweden).
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We have laymen on the higher courts too, but a smaller proportion than where I serve.
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Re “O’Learys”, years ago I read that (some) English towns had stopped using apostrophes on street signs on the grounds that it might confuse emergency services, hence “Martins Place” instead of “Martin’s Place”. Add to that the apparent inability of millions of native speakers to spell the word “its”, and perhaps the sports bar types should get off lightly. Here in Germany, people often incorrectly use apostrophe-s for the plural (“Hot Dog’s”), which confusingly is quite correct in Dutch, or for the possessive, which is simply wrong/anglicising. The apostrophe actually has very few legit uses in Ge. orthography.
Re “put”, no simple equivalent for that in Ge. either. “Get “is another common verb that has/requires myriad distinct translations.
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In Dutch, the apostrophe in the plural (e.g. auto’s, baby’s) is there because they should be written with double vowels because the syllable is long (autoos, babyys). It has nothing to do with other uses of the apostrophe.
In German, it is current to add just an apostrophe to form the genitive is the noun ends in an s, e.g. Andreas’ Buch. Note that this is wrong in English; it is Olbers’s paradox, not Olbers’ paradox. (In English, s’ at the end of a word is the genitive plural).
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Yeah, Léon is good. There are lots of quirky things in that film that I like, but I won’t plot spoil for anyone who hasn’t seen it. They should. I actually succeeded in getting my daughter to watch it, for once – she usually won’t accept my film recommendations because our taste in films is normally so radically different (although I did let her talk me into watching the fairly recent film about the Bröntes, which I liked).
Conga rats on your 4 year renewal. Sounds like a big vote of confidence.
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Serial posting. I grew some beautiful looking tomatoes in Perth when we were living there in 2010, but the skin was so tough it was almost impossible to cut or bite into them. No idea why. I’m the world’s worst gardener – my only raging successes were some fennel which threatened to take over the world, a passionfruit vine, and my precious almond tree, which I carted home in the back of the car with about 3m of tree hanging out the back, praying the cops wouldn’t catch me, and planted and nurtured with loving care, which it repaid by being covered in glorious blossom and then a huge crop of almonds. We sold the place and left before any were ripe enough to eat (or before the big flock of black cockatoos that used to overfly the place decided to descend and rip it to shreds). But the stupid bastards who bought the place pulled it out – I looked to check on it on Google Earth and it was gone, along with the garden shed I had built 😦
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The ex and myself planted an almond tree on our property near Tamworth NSW. The first year it bore a crop, our dogs ate all the low hanging fruit, the white cockatoos got all the ones on top, and our horses got the rest. At least somebody got to enjoy them…
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I haven’t tried growing my own tomatoes, but I do regularly buy some at the local farmers’ market when they are in season. The farm I usually buy them from is in a neighboring municipality. Those tomatoes are far better than the ones I can get in the grocery store, which typically come from California or Mexico and have to be able to survive a journey of more than 5000 km by truck to get here.
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And to combine the themes of apostrophes and fresh vegetables: There is a thing in English called the greengrocer’s apostrophe. This involves mistaking the genitive form for the plural form, e.g., “Cucumber’s, $1.50/lb.”, and is most commonly, but not exclusively, found in grocery stores. The phenomenon has apparently been observed on both sides of the Atlantic.
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In Sweden we have the cafeteria quotation mark that indicates emphasis and has educated folks laughing.
Super “FRESH” sandwiches!
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On “withdrawing the whip”: There is a similar usage in US politics. In the legislature, each party has a person called the “whip”, who is either the second (for the minority party) or third (for the majority party) in command among that party’s representatives in that legislative body. I gather that “withdrawing the whip”, in ordinary English, means that the legislators in question have been kicked out of their party and are therefore no longer under any obligation to follow the party leadership. But I can understand why somebody who is not familiar with the terminology might find the idea of withdrawing the whip as a punishment to be rather kinky.
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Masochist: Beat me! Beat me!
Sadist (after long pause): No!
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From (possibly faulty) high school memory, the Whip was the person who summed up the arguments for a side at the end of a debate. They were usually the most important, because they would hit the opposing team with a brief but efficient summary of their case.
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Martin, those tomatoes look like the ones we used to call “egg tomatoes” when I was a kid. They’re now called Roma variety. They used to be very cheap, because most people would buy the old Grosse Lisse variety instead. Then everybody found out what we had learned – the Roma are delicious. Now they are some of the most expensive tomatoes around.
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“Lonely contract killer”
Just putting this out there – maybe he wouldn’t be so lonely if he stopped killing people? It does tend to put people off.
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Reminds me of a line spoken by the title character in the 1997 movie Grosse Pointe Blank, in which he responds to his psychiatrist’s suggestion to attend his high school reunion:
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When I was a little kid, my paternal grandparents had an almond tree in their back yard, and I used to love to climb it and pick ripe almonds, which are absolutely delicious straight off the tree (after the shells are removed, obviously). Consequently, it was always my cherished ambition to grow my own almond tree. Which I did, surprisingly successfully given my abject uselessness as a gardener, but little good it did me. I’ve got some nice photos somewhere of the tree covered in blossom, but that’s all. I hate that someone just killed it in order to put in a ridiculous bath tub – sized backyard swimming pool.
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“Sudden insight: a rocket is a flying cannon firing continuously at the ground.”
Related insight: The Earth is simply a ginormous cannonball that’s much too big to fit in the cannon.
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“…has to hurt these countries’ major conservative parties really badly.”
Nope. Experience has shown that the people who vote for these parties are, in the main, not bright enough to realise their error.
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Don’t know if you managed to attend WorldCon in Dublin, but I ended up being on four panels, and participate in one fencing demo. It is surprising how bruised you feel after (intentionally, thankfully) falling flat on the floor half a dozen times.
I only managed to spectate a single panel, the amount of people there was… fascinating.
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I didn’t go this time because of the flying / climate issue. See you some other time!
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I’m planning to spend ~a week in Stockholm in the not-too-distant future,and I have a couple of half-baked board games I could bring along for the-critiquing-of, if that appeals? We’d have to sort out a way of actually setting a calendar entry, though. But I imagine these things are doable.,
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Cool, let me know!
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Have you ever played Monotony? It’s a bored game.
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😀
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One of the most violent board games. Not really clear on why the Russian guy thinks this game was particularly violent.
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