- I’m heading out on tour. Conference in Jena, speak about Aska, sightseeing in Prague and Ostrava, conference in Kraków, speak about Husby, meet colleagues and collect conserved finds in Łódź.
- The platform of my political candidacy is “I don’t share your concerns and I think you’re an idiot for voicing them”.
- Met a guy today with my exact hair and sideburns configuration. He was wearing vintage clothing though. Should have asked him what subculture I belong to.
- The rain lashes the skylights in my East German garret room as I translate Lord Dunsany into Swedish.
- My list of recently used emojis has a new item. ✊
- The Germans bombed Britain 51 times from airships during WW1.
- Prague is full of US college students and head shops. In addition to the well kept historical glory.
- In East Germany a lot of the homeless people have punk style hair and clothes. In Sweden the only ones I see are a lawyer neighbor and an eminent Stone Age scholar.
- Yuriy Gagarin’s first space flight was what you got if, with little regard for the risk to him, you welded a deep-sea diving bell onto the top of an intercontinental ballistic missile.
- So annoying. You need a few buckets of lard, and all you can find are endless laundromats. Not one single lardomat!
- Happy to find that my rudimentary Polish allows me to understand bits of Czech as well.
- Saw an exhibition on German atrocities against Czech civilians in 1942 at the National (of course) Museum. Thinking of Ukraine in 2022.
- Passed a woman who was carrying her 2-y-o on her shoulders. The little one was sucking her thumb and humming muffledly & contentedly to herself. ❤
- Czech inner cities don’t have the mix of ruins and perfect upkeep that you see in Polish and Baltic cities. Simply richer, or just a different way of dealing with uncertain post-Holocaust and post-Communist property ownership?
- The intro to “Animal Nitrate” blows my mind.
- The Jews are coming back to Czechia and Poland, reclaiming ancestral property or as tourists. But they’re Israeli Jews now, and they’ve created a market for Near Eastern restaurants where you listen to Lebanese music while eating Moroccan fish soup. Have some shakshouka with falafel!
- Chatting with a friendly Kraków lithics specialist, I tell him I’m at the University of (w)Oodge here in Poland. He looks confused, not sure where this is. Later he suddenly shouts, “You’re at Oodge! Now I understand! Of course I know about Oodge! You can’t say ‘(w)Oodge’ like that!”
Aardvarchaeology - by Dr. Martin Rundkvist 
What do these words have in common: slaughter, ransack, club, knife, berserk?
They were all adopted to the English language from the Vikings.
https://boingboing.net/2022/09/22/the-viking-influence-on-the-english-language.html
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As for the lack of ruins in old Czech inner cities – they weren’t necessarily ruined in WW2, because the war ended just when the fronts had arrived to Czechia. Prague survived practically unscathed. And the communist era didn’t do much to “modernise” old buildings.
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I am referring to the great number of buildings in the city centres of Poland and the Baltic States that are in ruins due to lack of upkeep. Not bombs.
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