August Pieces Of My Mind #2

• As a 5-y-o Star Wars fan I was confused by the relationship between light sabres and Lifesavers hard candy.
• Looking forward to spending a lot of time at the library of the Royal Academy of Letters again in the coming months.
• Bought my first gig ticket since the pandemic started (Orange Goblin) and my first theatre tickets in years.
• I wonder about those live D&D dungeons you could pay to enter in the UK in the 80s. They used to advertise in White Dwarf. In order to turn a profit they can’t have had a lot of staff. Were they incredibly lame?
• Movie: Free Guy (2021). The Gnostic perspective of The Matrix and The Truman Show meets the expendable extras as protagonists of Redshirts. Grade: good!
• Feeling energetic, enthusiastic, anticipatory about the autumn’s work and play.
• Finally listened to some Watain. Not my style, but impressive musicianship.
• I miss big solid mechanical power switches. My monitors have these ridiculously unreliable touch switches.
• All over Scandinavia you can find trad jazz bands consisting of men in their 70s and 80s, playing Dixie music. Hardly surprising, you may say, old men playing old music. But they’re actually not old enough by far to belong to the original Dixieland audience. The bands started during a high school craze in the 50s, when kids either listened to early rock’n’roll or to Dixie revival. These old men have been playing old music since they were young.
• Here’s a handy tip for all you fans of Asian cooking. When a recipe calls for edamame, you can always swap it out for Edamer instead. Save yourself a trip to the store!
• You know when archaeologists find a human figurine and can’t tell who it represents? This can mean either that we don’t recognise the figurine’s iconographic attributes or that there are no particular attributes. And here’s the relief for us: in the second case, ancient people couldn’t identify the figurine either. They would rely on the maker or owner to tell them “This is supposed to be Ullr”.
• My parents, my ex, myself, my wife, our kids and Cousin E have all been vaccinated.
• Christian Frenchman proselytizing to guy on park bench just now: “Ze salary of sin is death”.
• Movie: The War of the Worlds (1953). Martians invade a world where scientists are revered hunks, generals have little effeminate moustaches and non-white people live only in India. Grade: OK, but toweringly great for its time and genre.