March Pieces Of My Mind #1

• Someone with a busty profile pic wants to be my Fb friend again, and this time she’s named “Henga Rastkar”. Honestly, this has got to be someone’s D&D character!
• Birdlike and sharklike creatures have evolved repeatedly from widely separated quadruped stock through Earth’s history. A dolphin is basically a deer that has undergone the same evolutionary pressure as that which created the tuna. I would love to see the next species of this kind, the ones that will radiate when H. sapiens is gone.
• I asked ChatGPT who I am. It responded with a mix of fact and fiction. It made me 14 months younger than I am and attributed a fictional book to me. Not a work of fiction, mind you, but a book that does not actually exist. It’s called Fornminnenas värld / The World of Ancient Sites.
• ChatGPT’s claim about a fictional book that I haven’t written reminds me of a scifi story. It’s about cinema buffs who take a print of a movie they like to a parallel universe and show it to an old director who, in that universe, never managed to make that particular movie. I forget why they wanted to do that. Maybe he made other movies that weren’t available in their continuity.
• Movie: In the Court of the Crimson King (2022). Rock band documentary after 50 years on stage. Grade: good!
• How many standup comedians have already opened with “I want you all to know that I’m asexual … maniac”?
• “What if all the world religions are wrong, if the only true religion is one practiced by a remote and obscure Inuit tribe, and God is a polar bear?” /Jonas Gardell
• In retrospect, Sweden’s unusual covid strategy turned out to be good. We’ve seen the least surplus mortality in the entire EU!
• Movie: A Foreign Affair (1948). Straight-laced Republican congresswoman goes to bombed-out post-war Berlin to investigate the morale and/or morality of the US occupation troops. Gets involved with a dashing captain who already has an arrangement with an alluring night club singer / former Nazi top brass mistress / disillusioned survivor. Grade: great! Confession: it took me days before I understood the pun about foreign affairs in the movie’s title.
• A memory: some of my co-workers at a contract archaeology unit in 1993-94 would select text from a document and print it. Not insert page breaks and print e.g. page 2-4.
• Met my Umeå student George from 2014 at this gig. He has a bioengineering degree and works in pharma!
• Tina Turner is amazing. Tony Joe White wrote “Steamy Windows”, but when he released his own recording of it after hers, it just fell flat.
• “… as Gaznak fought he held his left hand hovering close over his head. Presently Leothric smote fair and fiercely at his enemy’s neck, but Gaznak, clutching his own head by the hair, lifted it high aloft, and Sacnoth went cleaving through an empty space. Then Gaznak replaced his head upon his neck, and all the while fought nimbly with his sword; …” Lord Dunsany, “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth”
• It is a little known fact, rarely advertised by archaeologists, that many fairly well preserved sites offer only boring mundane repetitive information about people’s lives in the past.
• Movie: Some Like It Hot (1959). Exaggerated cross-dressing farce among gangsters and lady musicians in 1929 Chicago and Florida. Grade: OK.

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