April Pieces Of My Mind #1

• I like to combine visits to my university in Łódź with side trips to see the country. Last year I was in Lublin and Kraków. A few weeks from now I’m going hiking in the great old-growth forest of Białowieża National Park!
• Just a reminder: the Epoch Times news organisation and Shen Yun travelling shows are propaganda outlets for Chinese Scientology. The conflict between Falun Gong and the Chinese Communist Party has no good guy, only two bad guys.
• Prepping a conference talk about metal-detecting in Sweden. Considered titling it “Swedish metal-detecting is slowly starting to rock”.
• Does my paper about Viking skull manipulation include the section header “Talking Heads”? Of course it does.
• If a news item mentions that a man is 26, it can be good or bad. But no man described as being 52 in a news item is ever good. He’s either bad, dead or horrendously wounded.
• I don’t understand why Darth Vader’s girlfriend is named PubMed.
• Polish orthography, how a certain vocal sound is represented with Latin characters, is highly consistent. I found it to be the easiest part of learning Polish. After all, I’m a native speaker of a language that thinks stjärt and höskörd is reasonable spelling. Polish, Swedish and German agree that compounds should simply be written as one word, no space or hyphen. Add this to Polish orthography though, and you end up with words that will hit an everyday English-speaker like a kick in the groin: WCZESNOŚREDNIOWIECZNYCH: “Early Medieval” (plural, genitive case)
• My son sent me a song he’s just written with mythological lyrics about a hero who fights the Sun Shader, gets his head knocked off, searches the world blindly for his head, and finally steals the Sun Shader’s head as a replacement. ❤
• It’s 2004. Someone gives you a non-OCR:ed scan of an article in Polish that is highly relevant to your work. It’s effectively a set of photocopies. You don’t know any Polish. What do you do? It’s 2024. Someone gave me a non-OCR:ed scan of an article in Polish that is highly relevant to my work. It’s effectively a set of photocopies. I just screenshotted it one column at a time and pasted it into Google Translate, and now I’m reading it in my native language.
• Maybe creativity is like a really flaky LLM that tries and fails to spout conventionalised averages of whatever it has been fed with.
• My kids are first-generation digital natives. Wonder for how many more generations there will be a digital world to be a native of. I don’t worry about humanity going extinct. But it isn’t looking so great for the techno-capitalist complex’s long-term survival.
• Jrette is headed for engineering school in Lund. So I’m thinking about a Scanian project so I get to go there a lot, look at finds at the university’s Historical Museum, have lunch with my kid. Might extend it to Zealand as well, it’s not far.
• My attempts to keep track of who’s Black and who’s Jewish and who’s Black and Jewish in Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue read like a deranged Nazi’s kill list.
• Hint of subcultural/class-related homogeneity in my RPG gaming group: the members have a total of seven children, named Samuel, Samuel, Signe, Signe, Emilia, Heidi and Ossian.
• I knew that the name Oscar is from McPherson’s fake Scottish folk poetry. Today I learned that Selma is too. Both names have been common in Sweden.
• Historical correctness of the material culture in Verhoeven’s 1985 Flesh+Blood, ostensibly set in 1501: forget about it, they didn’t even try.
• Anybody feel like gyring and gimbling? In the wabe?
• Bought two climbing roses, planting soil and barn manure. Swapped out a lot of the old soil in a big planting basin on the street gable end of our house, planted the climbers, transplanted three shrub roses that have been eking out stunted & undernourished lives on much worse soil around the house. Now I have FIVE ROSE BUSHES just outside the yard gate to look at every morning for seven months until the frost sets in. Been waiting for this for ages!
• Reading the enormously long short story anthology The Weird is really relaxing because it liberates me from two of my reading hangups. 1) There’s no way I will finish it anytime soon, so there’s no reason to press on with it. 2) The stories are unconnected, so I don’t forget bits of the context if I leave it untouched for a week or two.
• I’ve seen many, many artist’s reconstructions of excavated burials. I don’t recall ever seeing a fat corpse in them.