September Pieces Of My Mind #1

In nearly twelve years in this house I can’t recall any previous bird collisions against the windows. This female blackbird (Turdus merula) never knew what hit her. Makes me sad! It’s one of my favourite species, visible and audible all year around our suburb. Lucky the nesting season is over, at least.

• “You might be thinking, and I could not blame you, that it is more plausible that Emanuel Swedenborg was having schizophrenic episodes than that the schizophrenics were having Swedenborgian episodes.” Mary Roach, Spook
• Yay, legendary game designer and raconteur Ken Hite recommends my castles book in the Ken & Robin backers’ newsletter!
• Shit’s getting weird here. Facebook just served me an ad for a New Age ayahuasca snorting event in Stockholm.
• Went yacht racing with my daughter and she was at the helm throughout. ❤
• Post-WW3 fiction often features high tech that still works. I envision a post-war world where no electronics work at all. You’ll be knapping arrowheads from iPads and scavenging iron for farm tools from crashed battle drones.
• When I was a kid I believed that any book that many people read would always stay popular, a universally understood reference. Strange and poignant to learn that successful authors can return to obscurity even in their lifetimes. Very Ecclesiastes.
• Vikings did not cremate people in a burning ship on the sea. It would just have burned down to the water line and dumped a barbecued grandpa on the neighbours’ beach. They burned the dead in a ship on land.
• A buddy of mine just announced that he’s going to be a grandpa soon. First guy my age in my circle to do so. His son is 21, mine is 22. Woah!
• Years ago I invented monomolecular filament dental floss. It will cut through teeth, flesh, bone and brain, but by God, it will never ever snap when you try to floss.
• Yay! You can order jeans in odd sizes online! When I buy them in stores I always have to settle for the right length and a way too large waist.
• Eddie Herlin did a damn good job of straightening out the gold foil figures from Aska that were folded up or bent. So now they’re going back soon to Björn Falkevik and Cheyenne Olander for a second round of hi-res photographs! All of them are the embrace motif, but there are a couple of really unusual designs there…
• I’m on Återskapat, the biggest Swedish reenactor’s podcast!
• I’ve started using the buses and trains occasionally again. I had forgotten how much fun it is to see lots of people!

Go home, Late Medieval Finnish church builder, you’re drunk. (Perttelin kirkko)