May Pieces Of My Mind #2

• All doomsters should check out last year’s album Beyond Vision by Acid King. Majestic shit!
• Had to go an extra loop back to the Central Station to drop my luggage. Stockholm music venues currently don’t let you bring bags even to the wardrobe counter for security reasons.
• Just saw a guy on an electric motocross bike drive 40 kmph on a hiking path in the woods. It sounded like a hand mixer.
• Lively activity in our insect hotel today!
• I just learned that Halmstad has this neat well-preserved castle from the early 1600s.
• Children are vague on geography and tend to assume that any place they know well is well-known to everyone. They will use obscure place names and get confused when you have never heard of them. One of the kids I grew up with used to talk about his or her summers at “Haverdal”. Neither of us had any idea of where it was on the map. Now I learn that it’s a coastal village in Halland, SW Sweden.
• Two of Sweden’s biggest convenience store chains have announced that they plan to stop selling cigarettes.
• We think it’s hard to understand Neolithic ceremonial sites. Well, good luck, future colleagues, with understanding the remains of 2020s installation art!
• The stupidest bullies in my schoolyard around 1980 never amounted to much later in life. It is deeply distasteful that their ilk are so prevalent in politics and the media these days. I want a public sphere where being vulgar, aggressive and boorish gets you nowhere. It’s sad to see how the Internet allows crooks to direct the thinking of dimwits without the editorial controls that used to keep them out of the mass media. I’m waiting impatiently for the end of this idiotic era.
• News from Turku: famed adult entertainment performer Loviisa Vittu is suing Louis Vuitton for trademark infringement.
• Back when Big Data was the fashionable buzz word, I repeatedly had to explain to enthusiasts that archaeological data are not just Big, they are Confused and Patchy and Hairy and Inconsistently Formulated. I can’t really see how the current generative algorithms could make me obsolete or even speed up much of the work I do. Because I’m in this really niche activity with no commercial potential that demands constant engagement with wildly non-standardised data as well as creative writing about them.
• Interesting procedural problems around president #45’s hush money to the porn star. A skeevy con man tends to surround himself almost exclusively with other skeevy characters. So when you call them to the witness stand, their credibility is shit from the start. Just like with the prosecuted old man himself.
• Odd fact of pop music history and UK politics: Roy Wood, a founding member of The Move and Electric Light Orchestra, was a member of UKIP för many years and then joined the Brexit Party.
• Roared Conan, “By Crumb! This is an excellent comic book!”
• Amazing how my kids now have professional skills that I’ve never been near. Junior can write code, design electronics and translate between Japanese, English and Swedish. Juniorette can run a kitchen full time that cooks for 150 people, as well as work the floor and back stage of a major grocery store.
• Movie: Westworld (1973). At an expensive vacation retreat staffed by robots, you can choose between violent sexy live role-playing in the Wild West, in High Medieval Europe or at an Imperial Roman villa. No risk to you! But of course the robots eventually go nuts. Grade: good!