March Pieces Of My Mind #1

Leksand seen from Granberget

• Remember Krycek’s treachery in The X-Files? Horrible!
• The name Jessica is Shakespeare’s coinage, possibly from the biblical Iscah.
• Arthur C. Clarke’s collected short stories take up over 1300 pages. Good stuff!
• Clarke’s first published stories from 1937-38 are scifi parodies.
• A Polish colleague asked me what my Swedish excavation budget was. I fell down a rabbit hole and gave him three wildly divergent numbers, as per exchange rate, relative average wage and Big Mac Index.
• Lecteur paisible et bucolique, / Sobre et naïf homme de bien, / Jette ce livre saturnien, / Orgiaque et mélancolique.
• It’s a shame that Veðrfölnir, the hawk that sits on the beak of the eagle at the top of the world tree, is not a household name like Níðhöggr and Ratatoskr.
• There’s only one thing that my old smartphone does surprisingly fast. And that’s read the QR code and communicate with online Swedish bank ID.
• So far there have been 42 lunar orbiters and 16 Martian orbiters. Artificial satellites, that is.
• Swedish neo-Nazis are settling in a few otherwise dying villages in southern Dalecarlia. There’s dirt cheap property and potential for local political influence. But I wonder if they are also attracted by National Romantic ideas about Dalecarlia as keeper of the nation’s undiluted essence. These ideas predate Nazism by about a century.
• On the Swedish protest against the pandemic restrictions: I am organising a protest against stoplights that keep me from stepping in front of speeding cars! Who’s with me?
• Surprised to learn that the sea shanty craze involves only one shanty, and that young people believe that this is the one and only shanty.
• Vasaloppet is the biggest Norwegian skiing competition in the world!
• With small children you can have a good kids week. My kids are grown, and I have had a really good kids week with them. Skiing & driving & cooking with Jrette, moving house with Junior. ❤
• I just got a news update on my phone titled “This morning’s most important news: Meghan Markle says…”. Really?
• The KORG synthesizer brand name means “Kato-Osanai organ”, after the company’s founders.
• I’m employed full time to do archaeological research, fieldwork and outreach with a little teaching on the side. Today I’m writing about a Viking sword found in a lake. How about that?
• Happy because someone near and dear to me has received their first shot!