March Pieces Of My Mind #2

They lifted Östervik railway bridge to a nearby work platform and refurbished it, and now it’s back looking nice!

• Previously as spiritual leader of a Christian sect I have taught that prayer is meaningless since God already knows. I am now setting myself up as a Buddhist sage, with the central teaching that all enlightenment is false. Feel like you’ve had a big revelation? Sorry, it’s just a transient neurological event.
• Woodpeckers don’t mind if you stand under the trees they’re pecking. Hold on to the tree and press your ear against its bark. It’s like nothing else, very intimate!
• In the Christian Medieval heroic literature of the Insular Celtic area, ancient head-hunting and trophy taking figures large. You know, the Mabinogion etc. But there is very little evidence that it was still practiced. Until the Vikings showed up and started doing really weird shit with severed heads in e.g. Dublin, probably horrifying the people who wrote that heroic literature.
• It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
• There’s a fundamental difference between theoreticians in the natural sciences and the humanities. The natural sciences aim to develop better theory. The humanities aim to develop more theory.
• Russia’s next dictator is out there somewhere. Wonder who it will be.
• Many Swedish noble families went extinct only one or two generations after they were ennobled. Sometimes because of high infant mortality, sometimes because men were ennobled late in life. Nobility was only inherited along the male line.
• Reading Mary Roach. Cool info: wild animals are really bad at judging the speed at which something scary approaches. Their flight responses have evolved to trigger on distance, namely the distance at which their home area’s fastest predator can reach them if they don’t get moving. Deer assume that nothing moves faster than a wolf.
• Churches tend to multiply by division. Each split creates a risk of sectarian enmity. For this reason I kind of like the Swedish Equmenia Church. It was formed in 2011 when the Swedish Methodists, Baptists, Salvation Army and Mission Covenant responded to dwindling membership numbers by putting aside their theological differences and de-splitting. I am quite ignorant about these things, but it seems the move has strengthened and reinvigorated them. I’m happy to game-master at their gaming convention.
• I’m being unusually ecclesiastical this weekend. Yesterday game-mastering in a dissenter church, today listening to my wife’s choir in the former state church.
• Not only is the 20th century in the past, we’ve gone through nearly a quarter of the 21st as well.
• This interests me. There’s a classical orchestra in Stockholm, founded in 2005, that is not a public institution but a joint-stock company, Sw. aktiebolag. They’ve been commercially viable for 19 years and counting. Most rock bands aren’t.
• Movie: Odd Man Out (1947). Irish resistance leader kills a man during a robbery to fund his movement, also gets shot himself, spends most of movie stumbling around faint and delirious from blood loss. Gorgeous cinematography. Funny supporting characters. Grade: OK.
• Major new paper in preprint on the population genetics of northern Europe after the arrival of the steppe Indo-Europeans. I’m reading it with huge interest. A few highlights: a) the Langobards started as migrants from Scandinavia, b) so did the Wielbark Culture in northern Poland that we have been identifying with the early Goths — but, c) in a development few had foreseen, by the time the late Goths show up speaking Germanic in southern Europe, they don’t have significant genetic continuity with northern Poland any more. The historical Goths are genetically a bunch of south European Scandy LARPers!
• Please, anyone who peer-reviews this paper, make them use BC/AD dates! Nobody in any field refers to the start of the Viking Period as “1200 BP”. BP dates are reserved for uncalibrated radiocarbon dates, which nobody in archaeology or history uses after c. 4000 cal BC.
• McColl et al. have made a naming mistake in the preprint. Their “East Scandinavian” genetic group only reaches the Swedish east coast after AD 1. Prior to that it focuses on North Jutland, the Danish Isles and Västergötland, while the Swedish east coast is full of people in the catch-all “Other” category. It should be renamed the Kattegat group.
• And he said unto them, “Hate not the religious person, hate religion!”
• Despite the incorrect spelling in the books, it is quite clear that the Harkonnens are not just generally evil, corrupt and greedy. Specifically they are a Finnish family with evil, corrupt and greedy habits. The originator of their line was Santeri Härkönen (1934-2006), an insurance claims adjuster in Oulu.
• It drives me absolutely nuts… When people end every single sentence in a paragraph with three periods… Or even four periods…. Or bizarrely with a row of colons ::::: Makes me want to shake them by the shoulders and shout GET A GRIP ON YOURSELF YOU LANGUID INDECISIVE STONER…
• Yes, language changes constantly. No, you can’t use this fact to argue that the particular errors you make when writing are OK and everybody will write that way 20 years from now. You’re just making the Galileo Argument.
• Hey blood donors, if you’ve ever had constipation trouble from the iron replacement pills — did you know that it is not only OK but actually encouraged to space out the dosage over a longer time, like one pill every third night?
• On my daily constitutional bike ride I came across a young cat near Tattby where I went to school for six years. When I made the mouse noise to catch its attention it ran up to me and demanded cuddles, duly delivered.
• In the first eleven pages of Telegraph Avenue, Chabon introduces at least twelve named characters that seem worth keeping track of. I’m keeping notes.
• My wife and I are very disappointed with this weather, snow and overcast in mid-March. And we feel that Blomsterlandet, the local garden centre, should be made to answer for this. It’s just not right that they can advertise and sell gardening supplies all year round, and then it snows in mid-March. We’re thinking of filing a complaint with the Consumer Protection Board.
• Listening to Bach’s 1724 St. John Passion as preparation for hearing a live performance on Sunday. Funny how Jesus is sung by a bass here, a really macho one on this recording, creating a contrast with the energetic tenor Evangelist. We’re used to images of pale wimpy Jesus and monk-like evangelists, but here they’re both super powerful. Imagine Isaac Hayes and Rob Halford singing every second verse on an uptempo song.
• Searching for a translation of Paul the Deacon’s History of the Lombards, I find Becoming Carole Lombard: stardom, comedy, and legacy by Olympia Kiriakou 2021.
• I don’t know what you people are reading, but in this P.J. Farmer novel here, aliens have just fed LSD chewing gum to Sir Richard Francis Burton and Alice in Wonderland, and they’re fucking.
• Because of weird throat architecture I can’t swallow pills whole or they get stuck. So, having a minor dental problem, I now have to chomp six hefty pills of amazingly vile-tasting penicillin every day for a week. I do it with oatmeal but it’s still awful every time. /-: