December Pieces Of My Mind #3

Baggensfjärden & Sumpholmen

• I don’t really know what a Christmas movie is. I never go to the movies or watch movies at home around Christmas.
• I’m always interested in historical and archaeological studies of social and political issues. But it’s more common to find historical and archaeological studies that name-check social and political issues despite barely being relevant to them. Always in the same over-earnest, slightly aggrieved tone. I find these failed attempts at political relevance ridiculous.
• Confession: I’m a space fan but I don’t understand why a conjunction is a big deal.
• We’re learning from the Norwegians! Sweden is also getting a project to check what is thawing out of our permanent snow patches and glaciers.
• Is Pratchett’s Dune sequel The Wee Frehmen any good?
• I’m so traumatised from 16 years in the academic precariat, that one year into my position with Uni Łódź I still catch myself feeling envious of people with university positions.
• Was reminded that like Nerthus, like Grendel’s mom, like any Lady of the Lake, the Aesir goddess Frigg lives in a wetland: in Fensalir, Fen Hall.
• Factories used to spew carbon dioxide that heated the planet plus particles that cooled the planet and caused lung disease. We got rid of the particles.
• Movie: It’s A Wonderful Life (1946). Didactic story about accepting your lot and helping your fellow men. Grade: OK.
• People seem to have had enormous problems with their digestion up to c. 1945. Or at least been super focused on it. I’ve never been aware of mine either way.
• Awesome. In Poland there are “sworn translators”. “I swear I will translate until I drop! Nothing is going to stop me!”
• So dark out in the afternoons and evenings. Feels like our house is on the seafloor. I half expect big fish with bioluminescent markings to swim past the windows.
• German has lent the word Schublade, “dresser drawer”, to Swedish (skufflåda) and Polish (szuflada).
• Maybe I shouldn’t feel so bad about being judged unimportant when someone wrote an English Wikipedia article about me. I wrote an article about an indie band from Philadelphia that released eight albums, and they weren’t judged important enough either.
• Had a 20th century moment. The keeper of the midday-empty sports bar was phoning in an order for vegetables. Slowly, one item at a time.
• Sweden’s best rock journalist Fredrik Strage interviews musicans big and small, young and old, often in English, sometimes in Swedish. I’m a proud patron!