May Pieces Of My Mind #3

Blue yellow beige

• The Swedish debate about racism is confused by the fact that Sw. ras has only ever meant ‘genetic breed, dog breed’. And many Swedes don’t know that Eng. race used to mean ‘cultural, ethnic, national group regardless of genetics’. So in Swedish it makes dictionary sense to say that “I’m not a racist, because I despise these people for their culture, not for their genetics”. On the other hand though, I guess many native English speakers today don’t know what race used to mean in their own language.
• Don’t believe them when they say us Lefties hate Israel. The truth is that we love the secular anti-nationalist Lefties of that country!
• Listening to the song “Race to the Air”, I wasn’t sure if it was by Phogg or Pond. Turns out it’s by Gum. I have very little idea of how each of them sounds, but I like all three bands!
• Learned something fascinating from the Återskapat podcast. Amica Sundström and Maria Neijman have activated a major Medieval source material that nobody seems to have touched before. There is no mention of it in the bibliographical databases. The huge KLNM encyclopedia has a single sentence about it: “Seals were often protected by fabric or leather bags and, towards the end of the Middle Ages, by metal cases” (15:194). The National Archives in Stockholm hold hundreds of these seal bags. They’re made from Medieval fabric that has been kept indoors, in the dark, since they were made. They pretty much retain their original colours! It’s a fabric sample archive! With calendar dates!
• The right-wing extremist tradwife trend reminds me of something. Women’s place in Taliban Afghanistan.
• Is it metal that the psychedelic doom metal festival I’m attending tonight is on the premises of Stockholm’s most well-known gay club, on a boat? I asked Rob Halford, and as he donned a sailor’s cap he told me, “Yes, my son. It is metal.”
• Listening to a podcast where someone talks about people getting hurt as “fiscal injuries” and “fiscal trauma”.
• As a boy over 40 years ago I used to play 1950s boardgames at my friend’s house. They looked ancient to me. Today I still play some of the games I bought in the mid-80s. Suddenly I realise that my 80s games are now much older than those 50s games were when we played them.
• Riding a ferry to Gotland to celebrate 25 years with a significant someone built in Hangzhou, I discover that the ship was built in Guangzhou.
• I’ve got a couple of really messed up books by the famous archaeologists Wilhelm Holmqvist and Nils Åberg, complete but falling apart. So I checked what it would cost to get them cloth-bound. It would cost roughly ten times the price of ordering well-preserved copies of the same books. Plus sales tax. 🙄
• Around sunrise, we heard an angry knock on our bedroom’s French window. A pheasant cock was attacking his own reflection in the glass.
• Rauks are ancient fossilised coral reefs that survived when the surrounding soft laminated limestone eroded away after the Ice Age.
• At a banquet in the late 1980s, a delegation from the Visby Tolkien Society gave the ivy on St. Olaf’s ruin to the Stockholm Tolkien Society as a diplomatic gift. I am pleased to report to all my fellow Stockholm Tolkienians that our ivy is doing well.
• So weird that I’m 52 now and have no understanding of how young people have fun. Feels like yesterday when I was 22 and had no understanding of how young people had fun!
• If you want to grow roses, don’t even bother with the whole water and fertiliser thing. Just move to a town with Medieval culture layers, lift a few street cobbles, poke a plant in, and you’re done.
• On a populous colonised Mars in 2059, there are still video rental stores. K.S. Robinson’s novel Red Mars was published in 1993, two years before I got dial-up internet access at home.