May Pieces Of My Mind #2

This Chinese Buddhist temple at Rosersberg near Stockholm was founded in 1999

• New journal note. Was the longhouse platform at Aska in Hagebyhöga re-used as a härad assembly mound?
• Emacsulate: to question someone’s gender identity because of what text editor they prefer.
• Our baby girl is back from over three months of happy and successful backpacking in SE Asia with her equally solid and dependable friends!
• Watching this new documentary about 80s scifi movies, I’m starting to feel like maybe John Carpenter and James Cameron are two different directors?
• Sorry to be obvious here, but “Tomorrow Never Knows” is sheer mind-blowing genius.
• Today: guide a group at Stensö Castle, deliver Aska finds to the County Museum, look at the longhouse platforms at Agla in Överjärna, boardgame night. All wearing shorts and sandals for the first time this year!
• I managed to creep this guy out through deviant social behaviour at a science fiction book store event. Go me! Specifically, I shook people’s hands “like an American political candidate”. I replied “They get so embarrassed if I kiss them.”
• Have you considered that there are lots of configurations of the hands of a clock that are impossible when it’s correctly set? Such as both hands pointing exactly at six.
• County archaeologist case handlers who haven’t used a metal detector will occasionally say that you can detect and map metal on your site, but you can’t unearth anything. Here’s my preferred response to this quaint way of thinking. It’s like telling an excavator that she can screen the dirt on her site, but she can’t collect anything she finds on the soil screen.
• Awesome. I’ve been publishing for over 30 years, and my fifth most cited piece of work is still the journal version of my BA thesis.
• Do I know any magazine or journal editor who might want to look at a popular essay on archaeology and storytelling? No academic jargon, no literature references.
• A century ago, one of the main political goals of Swedish workers was to demonstrate to society at large that they were not stupid, ignorant or irresponsible. They passed this test and the elite opponents of democracy soon quieted down. Things are quite different now.
• Summer is here. The first plum blossom, the first mason bees around the insect hotel, the first chequered lily. I’ve carried the biggest potted plants into the yard for the season. Bliss.
• Visited a Viking Period cemetery today where only one structure was high enough to show up on the lidar, and it turned out to be a humongous anthill.

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