November Pieces Of My Mind #3

Lecco

• As a small finds specialist, I gotta say if you can’t tell whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie or not, then you need a much tighter type definition.
• Call me slow, but I just realised today that nationalism is way more of a call to actually do something big when you’re a crowd of small principalities in 1800, like Italy or Germany, than when you’re France or Sweden. I mean, you’re already France or Sweden regardless of any nationalists.
• Realisation: For all their revolutionary rhetoric, Mao and the CCP never actually participated in any revolution in the sense of overthrowing a government. They emerged victorious out of decades of civil war and the World Wars. China was then functionally Communist for only thirty years before shifting into the current long period of capitalist single-party dictatorship.
• Following the Hate & Gasoline Party’s success in the recent Swedish elections, the EU majority has lost faith in Sweden as an effective participant in political measures against the climate emergency.
• Sometimes when I request a book from the stacks at the research libraries I use, I’m done with it efter 15 mins. But I delay returning it as long as possible, so the librarians won’t feel that I’m wasting their time.
• Just back from a happy week in Lecco on Lake Como in Lombardy with wife and grown-up daughter. Long scenic sunshine walks, good meals, museums, churches, learning to play scopa. We rode the new sleeper train from Stockholm to Hamburg and back. 28 hours from Stockholm to Lecco, about a third of which I spent sleeping. The ride cost three times the cheapest air fare.
• I’m launching a new e-book format where each book is a large video file of someone paging slowly through a paper book. To read a page you click “pause”. Gonna be rich!!!
• Reading Bill Bryson’s 1998 book A Walk in the Woods, I came upon some odd figures. He says that it usually takes five months to hike the entire Appalachian Trail. The trail’s website puts it at five to seven months. The trail is about 3530 km long. A month is on average 30.63 days. This means that a normal “thru-hiker” averages a speed of 19.2 km a day, every day for half a year, carrying a heavy backpack. That’s pretty fast. But of course, this is a case of survivor’s bias. The numbers only apply to thru-hikers: people who actually succeed in hiking the entire trail. And they aren’t typical hikers.
• Augerum near Karlskrona in southern Sweden is not a famous place. It’s mainly known for a modern cemetery. Vendel Period scholars know it for a 6th century jewellery grave in an unburnt boat, excavated by Oscar Montelius. But now Augerum has a new claim to fame. A major meth lab has just been busted there!
• Movie: Despicable Me (2010). Two hi-tech supervillains compete for who can shrink and steal the moon. One of them adopts three little orphan girls as part of a scheme to steal the shrink gun. Lots of minions! Grade: great!