Dr. Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, skeptic, atheist, lefty liberal, bookworm, boardgamer, geocacher and father of two.
View all posts by Martin R
400 thoughts on “Open Thread For October”
Just thought I’d give a friend a little international exposure.
Like Martin and Phillip, do you suffer from not being able to see your penis? This lady, who I would want for my urologist if I needed one, can tell you how to find it.
Some strange adoptions are not that unusual in nature. I have witnessed a few that made me marvel, like the sheepdog that taught a starving abandoned kitten how to catch mice, and chewed the mice into mush for the kitten to eat until it could cope with solid food.
I overlooked this – Oct 27th was the 83rd birthday of a certain silly walker.
.
The new PM will not attend the meeting about stopping climate change. He will let the world burn.
.
I would add links to various Brit stand-up comedians but it is 3 in the morning, so fuggit.
“Immigration Centre attacked in Kent”
-First it was a ‘terrorist attack’. Then they discovered the attacker was white and the description changed.
The government propaganda has targeted immigrants for years- when things like this happen, it should count as “stochastic terrorism”.
As for the consistent incompetence and dishonesty of the government, see the link.
The Chinese lunar rover Yutu-2 is still operational after three years.
.
Israeli election is too close to call.
.
Egypt: Cop 27 protesters will be corralled in desert away from climate conference. So a general/president-for-life with a record of torture and executions is limiting the debate? What a surprise this must have been for those who picked Egypt as the place for the conference.
The Kunskapskanalen TV channel has a series by the archaeologist Janina Ramirez- today the program was about the Maes Howe burial complex, and the excavations that started in the 1930s . Swedish viewers can look forward to reruns.
Different people interpret different facial expressions very differently. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-10-people-facial-differently-reveals.html
-As humans have always lived in groups I would have thougt the interpretations would be very similar, but once spoken language dominated communication there would have been freedom for more diversity without catastrophic failure of communication.
We’re currently having an international financial summit (whatever that is) (except for three American bankers who didn’t come because the US State Department told them not to – so three listened to the wankers at the State Department, and a lot of others just ignored them).
We’re also hosting the International Rugby Sevens competition – if you don’t know what that is, it’s a sporting tournament that is actually a very big deal with a lot of people, but not worth wasting my time explaining.
And we’re in the middle of having a typhoon. Which could get a lot worse tomorrow. Or not.
Oh, and to add to all of this good fortune, our Finance Minister who was going to host the financial summit came down with Covid-19 a couple of days before it started.
It’s a Global Financial Leaders’ Investment Summit, whatever the hell that is, and by all reports it’s all going swimmingly. Of course, all of the big bankers are snug indoors, so the typhoon won’t be bothering them unless they actually want to leave wherever they are.
The SF con LunCon 2022 is just over.
.
Ylva the cat has discovered the radiator at the window has been turned on for the fall, so now she has hogged a spot on a bench where she can sleep with her back pushing at the radiator.
Addendum – visiting me in hospital every day for more than two weeks really didn’t help.
Every day before she was permitted to enter the hospital, she had to go through this bizarre process of doing a rapid antigen test for Covid-19, which would get her into the district testing centre (quite far away from both our place and the hospital), where she was have to queue up for a couple of hours (not exaggerating) to have a PCR test and wait for the result before she could then be admitted to the hospital.
And then she was only permitted to remain in the hospital for 30 minutes.
The whole this was like something out of WWI or that era. And she did that every day for >two weeks. She’s not a young strong woman any more. She never was very strong due to the impact of the tuberculosis she had when she was a teenager.
So I think she can be forgiven for being tired and forgetful now.
The pandemic policy in HK and in the Mainland looked like a big success in the first year, but now continuing it unmodified in the third year it is really becoming burdensome, tiresome, damaging and a lot of other adjectives I could think.
As best as I can make out, the rest of the world, now that the much more virulent Delta variant has passed, has just accepted that more elderly people are going to die sooner, whereas the Chinese simply won’t accept that.
The complication is that a high proportion of the elderly people they are trying to protect is just refusing to be vaccinated.
If it was up to me, I would tell them they have made their choice and need to accept the consequences, but apparently that makes me inhuman and definitely not Chinese.
Funny story – when I was in hospital, we were not permitted to leave our beds. Don’t ask me why, I guess they were scared that we would fall and hurt ourselves or something. I had quickly acquired a well deserved reputation as a recalcitrant trouble maker, violent brawler (male hospital staff only, I hasten to add), etc., so I was warned that if I so much as placed one foot on the floor, they would immediately tie me down with restraints and leave me there.
So to urinate, we had to do it while on our beds, pissing into those transparent plastic urinals that they give to male hospital patients. So we each had our plastic bottle.
I hate going without cleaning my teeth and using mouth wash, and insisted on doing it, and the only receptacle I had to spit in was my urinal. I should add that the mouth wash I had was a dazzling iridescent blue colour.
So one night I cleaned my teeth, spat into my urinal, rinsed my mouth with fresh water, rinsed my mouth with blue mouth wash and spat that into the urinal. The urinal already contained rather a lot of urine which was, obviously, yellow. The mouth wash mixing with the urine made an interesting colour.
Then the cute, sweet little Cantonese night trainee nurse came around to collect the partly full urinals and replace them with empty ones.
She glanced at mine as she took hold of it, then did a double take, held it up to the light, stared at it in disbelief, turned to look at me and said loudly in English: “GREEN???”
Wordlessly I held up my bottle of mouth wash. She said: “Ah”, nodded and wandered off to empty my urinal.
Haha! Would you also care to tell us how your *first* altercation with the staff came about? My head spins when I try to imagine what caused seven hospital orderlies to wrestle a 73-y-o engineer with pneumonia, busting several of his ribs.
It was nine male staff (orderlies, male trainee nurses, doctors, whatever). My ribs are not busted, just a bit bruised (but even that is bloody painful if you sleep on them for any length of time), plus I have the opioid painkillers for that. If the ribs were actually cracked, the pain would be worse, and a lot sharper – I know because I have cracked ribs before.
What caused the first altercation? It was when they tried to jam an oxygen helmet down on my face that was too small, and it was painful, and besides I couldn’t breathe, which seemed to defeat the object of the exercise. I yelled at them and told them to stop because the mask was too small, and that they needed to get a bigger one. They didn’t listen. So I threw them off me and they all ended up sitting on the floor. That was when there was only three of them.
They didn’t summon the full complement of nine staff to hold me down until the third attempt.
But in my defence, a couple of days later, once all of the restraints were off and I no longer had to wear that helmet and had a cannula instead, all of the little trainee nurses were saying: “John is a good boy now.” Yes, I am a nice, well behaved person, unless provoked past a certain point, at which point I transform into a definitely not nice boy. Stop provoking me, and I revert to being a very good boy.
*Being me, and having been warned what would happen to me if I even placed one foot on the floor, I periodically entertained myself by hanging on leg over the side of the bed and waving my foot around 20 mm above the floor. They were getting down on hands and knees and peering sideways to make sure my foot was not actually touching, before they finally got the point that I was taking the piss out of them and gave up monitoring my compliance to within such a close tolerance.
At which point, naturally, being me, I put my foot on the floor. Followed by the other one. Followed by getting out of bed and walking around the bed, supporting myself on it to make sure I didn’t fall, to stretch my legs a bit.
I kept that up until one of the young male trainee nurses who was my secret spy let on that I had better stop it, because he had heard them making plans to tie me down in restraints again.
Some degree of cognitive decline is to be expected witj age, but it may also be a symptom of dementa. An assessment by specialists may be called for.
Also, watch out for over-medicating, it can sometimes result in confusion if a single patient has a lot of ‘legacy’ prescriptions from many different MD s that have not communicated with each other.
The Swedish defence bought a lot of
NH90 helicopters from Europe, to replace the ancient Boeings. They are so troublesome they cost 200,000 sek in mainteance per flight hour (20,000) USD .
Instead, the defence wants Blackhawk helicopters that cost 40,000 skr per hour.
The cobra renamed Houdini inspired five lions to briefly escape the Sidney zoo.
.
If toxoplasma gondii makes people stupid, I must have had the parasite my whole life.
The shallow Acraman lake in southern Australia is a very eroded impact scar from a huge asteroid impact ca 580 Mya, during the Ediacaran era shortly before the ‘Cambrian explosion’.
It was of similar size as the much later dinosaur killer at Cixchulub.
Anyone not familiar with the actress Aubrey Plaza is really missing out – she is the funniest person in the world; no exaggeration. No one can make me laugh like Aubrey. A lot of the humour is in her facial expressions while she talks absolute nonsense.
*Aubrey means Elf King. Which in her case kind of fits. Once she met Donald Trump while she was dressed/disguised as Noddy the Elf.
Comment # 400 in the thread.
Time for a November cutoff?
Also, no major scandals from Britain this week, this almost makes me expect the next calamity will be Sellafield blowing up, just to keep the average news level awful.
Aardvarchaeology - by Dr. Martin Rundkvist 
Just thought I’d give a friend a little international exposure.
LikeLike
The Trip (2021) – Norwegian horror-comedy. Hilarious.
LikeLike
Vols win, beat Kentucky 44-6, a brief musical selection:
LikeLike
Like Martin and Phillip, do you suffer from not being able to see your penis? This lady, who I would want for my urologist if I needed one, can tell you how to find it.
LikeLike
????????
LikeLiked by 1 person
I can’t see the farther end of mine due to the curvature of the Earth.
LikeLike
LikeLike
Brazil.
Lula da Silva has won over Bolsonaro with 51% to 49 %.
And Sir Vääs (now renamed Houdini) is safely back in his cobra terrarium.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Some strange adoptions are not that unusual in nature. I have witnessed a few that made me marvel, like the sheepdog that taught a starving abandoned kitten how to catch mice, and chewed the mice into mush for the kitten to eat until it could cope with solid food.
But this is a new one on me:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-31/whale-southern-right-humpback-photograph-adoption-esperance-wa/101594876
LikeLiked by 1 person
Cats and lapdogs are obvious baby substitutes for us humans.
LikeLike
I overlooked this – Oct 27th was the 83rd birthday of a certain silly walker.
.
The new PM will not attend the meeting about stopping climate change. He will let the world burn.
.
I would add links to various Brit stand-up comedians but it is 3 in the morning, so fuggit.
LikeLike
More Haughey.
https://www.thestandard.com.hk/section-news/section/11/246870/More-golden-glory-for-birthday-girl-Haughey
LikeLike
“Immigration Centre attacked in Kent”
-First it was a ‘terrorist attack’. Then they discovered the attacker was white and the description changed.
The government propaganda has targeted immigrants for years- when things like this happen, it should count as “stochastic terrorism”.
As for the consistent incompetence and dishonesty of the government, see the link.
or
LikeLike
The Chinese lunar rover Yutu-2 is still operational after three years.
.
Israeli election is too close to call.
.
Egypt: Cop 27 protesters will be corralled in desert away from climate conference. So a general/president-for-life with a record of torture and executions is limiting the debate? What a surprise this must have been for those who picked Egypt as the place for the conference.
LikeLike
The Kunskapskanalen TV channel has a series by the archaeologist Janina Ramirez- today the program was about the Maes Howe burial complex, and the excavations that started in the 1930s . Swedish viewers can look forward to reruns.
LikeLike
…I meant Sutton Hoo.
LikeLike
Different people interpret different facial expressions very differently.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-10-people-facial-differently-reveals.html
-As humans have always lived in groups I would have thougt the interpretations would be very similar, but once spoken language dominated communication there would have been freedom for more diversity without catastrophic failure of communication.
LikeLike
LikeLike
We’re currently having an international financial summit (whatever that is) (except for three American bankers who didn’t come because the US State Department told them not to – so three listened to the wankers at the State Department, and a lot of others just ignored them).
We’re also hosting the International Rugby Sevens competition – if you don’t know what that is, it’s a sporting tournament that is actually a very big deal with a lot of people, but not worth wasting my time explaining.
And we’re in the middle of having a typhoon. Which could get a lot worse tomorrow. Or not.
So yeah, it’s all happening for us this week.
LikeLike
Right now it’s blowing pretty hard, Wife just struggled in complaining about it, and it could get even stronger tomorrow.
In which case I suspect a few things are going to be more than a little bit fucked up.
LikeLike
Oh, and to add to all of this good fortune, our Finance Minister who was going to host the financial summit came down with Covid-19 a couple of days before it started.
LikeLike
It’s a Global Financial Leaders’ Investment Summit, whatever the hell that is, and by all reports it’s all going swimmingly. Of course, all of the big bankers are snug indoors, so the typhoon won’t be bothering them unless they actually want to leave wherever they are.
LikeLike
Wow, here’s some hot anthropological news – some guy thinks that Neanderthals might have been carnivorous. That’s going to shock a few people.
Zinc Isotope Evidence Of Carnivorous Neanderthals
https://www.anthropology.net/p/zinc-isotope-evidence-of-carnivorous
So, maybe they weren’t really herbivores after all, it was just that the Iberian Neanderthals were vegan for ethical reasons.
LikeLike
The SF con LunCon 2022 is just over.
.
Ylva the cat has discovered the radiator at the window has been turned on for the fall, so now she has hogged a spot on a bench where she can sleep with her back pushing at the radiator.
LikeLiked by 1 person
NOTE TO BIRGER JOHANSSON: I am posting this now so that you won’t have to do it later.
LikeLike
Addendum – visiting me in hospital every day for more than two weeks really didn’t help.
Every day before she was permitted to enter the hospital, she had to go through this bizarre process of doing a rapid antigen test for Covid-19, which would get her into the district testing centre (quite far away from both our place and the hospital), where she was have to queue up for a couple of hours (not exaggerating) to have a PCR test and wait for the result before she could then be admitted to the hospital.
And then she was only permitted to remain in the hospital for 30 minutes.
The whole this was like something out of WWI or that era. And she did that every day for >two weeks. She’s not a young strong woman any more. She never was very strong due to the impact of the tuberculosis she had when she was a teenager.
So I think she can be forgiven for being tired and forgetful now.
The pandemic policy in HK and in the Mainland looked like a big success in the first year, but now continuing it unmodified in the third year it is really becoming burdensome, tiresome, damaging and a lot of other adjectives I could think.
LikeLike
Trying times, not fun.
LikeLike
As best as I can make out, the rest of the world, now that the much more virulent Delta variant has passed, has just accepted that more elderly people are going to die sooner, whereas the Chinese simply won’t accept that.
The complication is that a high proportion of the elderly people they are trying to protect is just refusing to be vaccinated.
If it was up to me, I would tell them they have made their choice and need to accept the consequences, but apparently that makes me inhuman and definitely not Chinese.
LikeLike
As it is, the system we have is almost Dickensian.
LikeLike
I was very surprised to learn that an elderly retired Zhejiang industrialist of my acquaintance has not taken a single shot against covid.
LikeLike
And yes, the typhoon has got worse, so we’re in lockdown.
This is a great time for my Wife, who is deteriorating mentally pretty fast now, to discover that she has forgotten to buy any food.
So I’m now engaging in the latest fad diet of prolonged fasting.
LikeLike
Dementia? )-:
LikeLike
I think it’s just cognitive decline with ageing, but it seems quite a lot at times, and she’s actually not all that old – she’s a lot younger than me.
LikeLike
I wish her the best!
LikeLike
Thanks. She’s got to the point where life is increasingly a struggle for her.
LikeLike
GREEN???
LikeLike
Funny story – when I was in hospital, we were not permitted to leave our beds. Don’t ask me why, I guess they were scared that we would fall and hurt ourselves or something. I had quickly acquired a well deserved reputation as a recalcitrant trouble maker, violent brawler (male hospital staff only, I hasten to add), etc., so I was warned that if I so much as placed one foot on the floor, they would immediately tie me down with restraints and leave me there.
So to urinate, we had to do it while on our beds, pissing into those transparent plastic urinals that they give to male hospital patients. So we each had our plastic bottle.
I hate going without cleaning my teeth and using mouth wash, and insisted on doing it, and the only receptacle I had to spit in was my urinal. I should add that the mouth wash I had was a dazzling iridescent blue colour.
So one night I cleaned my teeth, spat into my urinal, rinsed my mouth with fresh water, rinsed my mouth with blue mouth wash and spat that into the urinal. The urinal already contained rather a lot of urine which was, obviously, yellow. The mouth wash mixing with the urine made an interesting colour.
Then the cute, sweet little Cantonese night trainee nurse came around to collect the partly full urinals and replace them with empty ones.
She glanced at mine as she took hold of it, then did a double take, held it up to the light, stared at it in disbelief, turned to look at me and said loudly in English: “GREEN???”
Wordlessly I held up my bottle of mouth wash. She said: “Ah”, nodded and wandered off to empty my urinal.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Haha! Would you also care to tell us how your *first* altercation with the staff came about? My head spins when I try to imagine what caused seven hospital orderlies to wrestle a 73-y-o engineer with pneumonia, busting several of his ribs.
LikeLike
It was nine male staff (orderlies, male trainee nurses, doctors, whatever). My ribs are not busted, just a bit bruised (but even that is bloody painful if you sleep on them for any length of time), plus I have the opioid painkillers for that. If the ribs were actually cracked, the pain would be worse, and a lot sharper – I know because I have cracked ribs before.
What caused the first altercation? It was when they tried to jam an oxygen helmet down on my face that was too small, and it was painful, and besides I couldn’t breathe, which seemed to defeat the object of the exercise. I yelled at them and told them to stop because the mask was too small, and that they needed to get a bigger one. They didn’t listen. So I threw them off me and they all ended up sitting on the floor. That was when there was only three of them.
They didn’t summon the full complement of nine staff to hold me down until the third attempt.
But in my defence, a couple of days later, once all of the restraints were off and I no longer had to wear that helmet and had a cannula instead, all of the little trainee nurses were saying: “John is a good boy now.” Yes, I am a nice, well behaved person, unless provoked past a certain point, at which point I transform into a definitely not nice boy. Stop provoking me, and I revert to being a very good boy.
LikeLiked by 1 person
*Being me, and having been warned what would happen to me if I even placed one foot on the floor, I periodically entertained myself by hanging on leg over the side of the bed and waving my foot around 20 mm above the floor. They were getting down on hands and knees and peering sideways to make sure my foot was not actually touching, before they finally got the point that I was taking the piss out of them and gave up monitoring my compliance to within such a close tolerance.
At which point, naturally, being me, I put my foot on the floor. Followed by the other one. Followed by getting out of bed and walking around the bed, supporting myself on it to make sure I didn’t fall, to stretch my legs a bit.
I kept that up until one of the young male trainee nurses who was my secret spy let on that I had better stop it, because he had heard them making plans to tie me down in restraints again.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Some degree of cognitive decline is to be expected witj age, but it may also be a symptom of dementa. An assessment by specialists may be called for.
Also, watch out for over-medicating, it can sometimes result in confusion if a single patient has a lot of ‘legacy’ prescriptions from many different MD s that have not communicated with each other.
LikeLike
The Swedish defence bought a lot of
NH90 helicopters from Europe, to replace the ancient Boeings. They are so troublesome they cost 200,000 sek in mainteance per flight hour (20,000) USD .
Instead, the defence wants Blackhawk helicopters that cost 40,000 skr per hour.
LikeLike
The cobra renamed Houdini inspired five lions to briefly escape the Sidney zoo.
.
If toxoplasma gondii makes people stupid, I must have had the parasite my whole life.
LikeLike
The shallow Acraman lake in southern Australia is a very eroded impact scar from a huge asteroid impact ca 580 Mya, during the Ediacaran era shortly before the ‘Cambrian explosion’.
It was of similar size as the much later dinosaur killer at Cixchulub.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Anyone not familiar with the actress Aubrey Plaza is really missing out – she is the funniest person in the world; no exaggeration. No one can make me laugh like Aubrey. A lot of the humour is in her facial expressions while she talks absolute nonsense.
*Aubrey means Elf King. Which in her case kind of fits. Once she met Donald Trump while she was dressed/disguised as Noddy the Elf.
LikeLike
34 minutes of glorious weird totally unpredictable Aubrey.
LikeLike
Roman soldiers were paid in salt. No they weren’t, don’t be so ridiculous.
https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2017/01/salt-and-salary.html?m=1
LikeLike
Genomic evidence for ancient migration routes along South America’s Atlantic coast.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.06.27.497820v2
LikeLike
The Tiangong Space Station has been completed.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Comment # 400 in the thread.
Time for a November cutoff?
Also, no major scandals from Britain this week, this almost makes me expect the next calamity will be Sellafield blowing up, just to keep the average news level awful.
LikeLike