- As a Social Democrat, I find it interesting that labour unions are treated as dangerous enemies by Nazis, Communists and Conservatives alike.
- Call me strange, but I don’t find sex shops sexy at all.
- There was a young woman of Aberystwyth / Who took grain to the mill to make grystwyth / There, the miller’s son Jack / Laid her flat on her back / And united the organs they pystwyth
- A high school memory: we’ve got this short story anthology with a story about two pious uneducated Mexican sisters who start a taco restaurant. One day a man orders and eats seven tacos. The younger sister’s mind is so blown by this that the only way she can express her awe is by going to bed with him immediately. This becomes a rule. But if a costumer even hints about prostitution, he is banned from the establishment.
- If you wonder if my wife and I were bourgeois and middle-aged in our 20s, please refer to the mushroom-picking field guide that we bought 15 months after we first met. ♥️
- Mars helicopter photographs its own mission’s landing backshell and parachute!
- Unexpected: the Amazon Kindle will soon no longer recognise the company’s own .MOBI file format when you email documents to your device, but it will start to recognise .EPUB, which is what everyone wanted anyway.
- Really enjoying Jon Ronson’s podcast series Things Fell Apart on BBC. He has a rare and admirable way of speaking with people whose convictions he doesn’t share without suggesting that he does share them.
- Strange to be talking to my old Tolkien Society buddy about people we knew 25 years ago, and a considerable number of them are dead.
- I’m increasingly feeling that the United States of America is a fucking awful federation that should be dissolved soonest.
- I just learned that Filip Norman died a year ago aged 47. I loved his band Qoph. They played at my 30th birthday party. I brought Junior to one of their gigs. I didn’t know Filip well but he was super nice. If I had my way he would have lived for another 50 years.
- I’m reading a novel from ten years ago. There’s already wifi and everyone already has a smartphone. We’re living in the future.
- Movie: Without a Clue (1988). The brilliant detective Dr. John Watson hires a stupid, cowardly, alcoholic actor to play the role of his fictional mystery solver Sherlock Holmes, and is very annoyed when the actor gets all the glory. Grade: OK.
- In the 1950s and 60s, war gamers couldn’t buy ten-sided or twenty-sided dice. They only had six-sided cubic ones. But they needed to roll dice against percentages. So they used tables of percentile likelihoods using six-sided dice only. “73%. If you roll this one number of d6 and subtract this other number of d6, then the chance of getting at least 34 is 73%”.
- As we hiked along the narrow sea passage Baggensstäket yesterday afternoon, a little boat passed us blasting “Sympathy for the Devil”.
- “God only knows what I’d be without you. Apart from that he knows nothing.” B. Wilson
- One of the black girls who used to play on our street, when we lived in the tenement blocks and our kids were little, is now a librarian at Fisksätra Public Library. ♥️
- Movie: High Life (2018). Slow arty story about the last two survivors of a group of criminals sent off on a one-way trip into interstellar space. Low-budget placeholder sets & props. Grade: Fail.
- Susanna Clarke’s novel Piranesi references The Magician’s Nephew, Carcieri d’invenzione, “The Library of Babel” and The Secret History. And also has a strong flavour of Zork!
- Woah. Chris de Burgh has released 22 albums. :-0
Aardvarchaeology - by Dr. Martin Rundkvist 