August Pieces Of My Mind #1

Fisksätra from the east during a hike in the Igelboda-Skogsö nature reserve

• Listen to a previously unpublished Avram Davidson story about being in the Marines in the Pacific in 1945!
• Padderokke is the wetland plant horsetails in Danish. Padderocker on the other hand is a member of a motorcycle gang who is a toad. I assume there is a cartoon.
• Movie: Chappie (2015). The creator-creation theme of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” meets militarised policing in an action movie. Grade: good!
• Wonder what galvorn and mithril sound like in the headphones of a metal detector.
• The Curiosity rover landed on Mars nine years ago today. It’s still roving away happily, having rolled over 26 km, gained 460 m in altitude and analysed 32 drill samples.
• Confusing when people use “generation” to mean “decade”. I was neither capable nor willing to become a dad when I was ten years old.
• Movie: The Girl With All The Gifts (2016). A few survivors confront the limits of their own humanity in a post-apocalyptic Britain full of fast fungal zombies. Grade: great movie based on a great novel by Mike Carey!
• I started working at 20 and I hope to continue until I’m 70. And now I realise that I’m only a few years from entering the last third of this odd career of mine. Feels like I just got started!?
• It’s important for scholars in the humanities to have a strong theoretical awareness. I, for example, am aware of theoretical archaeology and strongly hostile towards it.
• There’s a Bellman song where you have to sing “ENSKTBLÄ”.
• Looking forward to spending a lot of time at the library of Royal Academy of Letters again in the coming months.