November Pieces Of My Mind #1

The Stockholm Furniture Design Museum is closing down for lack of public funding.

• The kettle drummer at my daughter’s choir concert (Rutter’s Requiem, 1985), looks just like Gary Gygax.
• Movie: Sami Blood (2016). Young Sámi woman goes to racist residential school c. 1930, is torn between her reindeer nomad upbringing and Swedish-speaking mainstream modernity. Grade: good!
• Movie: Bacurau (2019). Murderous American vintage gun aficionados descend on an isolated Brazilian village in this oddly paced siege narrative. Grade: OK.
• Never mind daylight savings time, let’s abolish November!
• Train hits something hard in the dark, like a boulder on the track, and rattles to a stop. I check our GPS position, and we’re at Bollbacken in Tortuna?! I spent half of 1993 here, excavating a Middle Neolithic seal hunting camp with a Pre-Roman urn cemetery on top! It was a dig in order to build this railroad! Update: It was an elk and the train’s front is completely messed up. We returned backwards to Västerås. The front of the train was full of grey fur and a length of intestine was dangling from it. The heavy smell of elk butchery could be felt even inside the carriage.
• What’s the political stance called where you don’t trust undemocratic selection processes for leaders (Lenin, Hitler, Charlemagne), but you don’t trust the democratic process either to reliably deliver fair, competent, non-corrupt leaders?
• Deflecting a threatening asteroid: save rocket fuel by shooting large pieces of orbital junk at it? Or bolt an ion engine to a smaller asteroid?
• The Russians have deployed troops to shoot their own demoralised troops. This will demoralise the troops doing the shooting, etc, etc.
• I’m at Junior’s manga convention watching animé from 1983. The Swedish voice acting is pretty good!
• Arnold in Predator: I hit the fuel dump. Me: “I hate to feel damp”?!
• Movie: Predator (1987). Sportsman goes trophy hunting on one of his favourite planets, is inconvenienced by armed conflict between factions among the prey. Grade: great in its genre but it’s not my genre. Annoyingly busy score, by the way. The orchestra seems to believe that it’s at a screening of a silent film and has to carry the sound entirely on its own.
• There should be a word for when you use a bit more than necessary of a product just because you want to empty the package and keep your shelves neat.
• If you have an accident with some furniture and there’s no sticky plaster in the drawer, then a Chinese psychologist will med-tape a piece of a panty liner to your head. That’s what I’ve learned today.
• The best Depeche Mode song since 1993 is probably not by Depeche Mode themselves. I think it may be “Undisclosed Desires” by Muse from 2009. Other candidates?
• I’ve bought 13 movie tickets to the Stockholm International Film Festival!

Advertisement