June Pieces Of My Mind #1

Visby Botanical Garden

• I was behind a car today with the registration letters FAP. I did not, though.
• A memory from the parental orientation course when my son was on his way. Our lecturer, a famed and controversial midwife, tries to include us future fathers in her talk. And she does this by telling us that she knows that what we will really need after a few weeks in the baby cocoon will be a night out with the lads, beer and a soccer match. When I tell her this is not how all men work, she asks quietly where my manliness is located, then. I don’t catch the question, but afterwards I come up with an answer, too late. “I like to keep it in my undies.”
• Are you the kind of person who would reveal to marauding goblins where the livestock is hidden? Then you should just face the facts: you’re a coworker.
• Yay! The National Library’s café has opened again after closing in 2020! And in August the basement restaurant named for an early runologist’s enormous note-taking tome will reopen too!
• Apparently one of the most common uses of LLMs in academia is copy editing: cleaning up your writing on points of spelling, grammar and style. This is wildly unattractive to me. I love writing. My personal style, my personal voice, are extremely high priorities to me. It annoys me no end when a journal editor replaces one of my unconventional style choices with something bland. If an editor ran a paper of mine through an LLM I would go absolutely nuts.
• Tried to use the idiomatic expression “scream bloody murder”, meaning “express great dissatisfaction”. Facebook threatened to disable my account.
• German towns have lent their names to two of my rose bushes: Rostock and Uetersen.
• The used-book store in Visby is very odd from a business perspective. It’s in a prime expensive location near the Medieval market square, but it’s only open seven hours a week. I can’t count the times I’ve gone past in a book-shopping mood and been frustrated. There is no way they’re making enough money on the business to pay rent or salaries. The owners are 72 and 63. My guess is that they own the property, and instead of letting the shop space out and actually making money, they’re running the used book store as a hobby. Or to annoy me.
• Another successful Swedish rapper murdered. He was my son’s age or younger. His second album was released five months ago.
• On 6 June in 1999, I went to a party and met a charming and pretty journalist of Chinese extraction. Since that day we’ve never been apart for more than a few weeks. Raised two kids and lived at three addresses together. 25 years with my YuSie!
• Listening to the Imaginary Worlds podcast about the truly astonishing number of books being banned from school and public libraries in the US. About half of them are about people of colour of queer people. And I remember reading Inger Edelfeldt’s gay coming of age novel “Duktig pojke” as a set text in middle school in the mid 80s. My teacher brought a box of that book into class as one of a few options. USA, you are a travesty.
• The Chinese space programme is impressive. A robotic probe of theirs just sent back the first samples from the far side of the Moon.
• The Scifi Book Stores in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö are one of Sweden’s most profitable businesses in book retail. They sell tabletop games as well. So at their recent equity issuance I did something unprecedented and bought some stock.
• Hey boardgamers with your resources represented by various coloured wooden cubes. When thinking about immigration, remember that immigrants are one of those resources. Sure, every 20th light brown wooden cube or so may come with a point penalty. But the net effect of receiving those cubes is super strong. It’s how you win the game after the Demographic Transition.
• After about half a century of wearing denim jeans, I finally find a use for the ridiculous little coin pocket: it holds a USB stick pretty neatly!
• Travelling Stockholm – Hamburg – Cologne – Brussels for a two-day conference about public metal detecting. It’ll take 24 hours, one third of which I’ll spend asleep. It’s the 2024 way to travel.
• Reading Douglas Adams’ 1992 novel Mostly Harmless for the first time. I was absolutely crazy about the first two Hitch-hiker books just seven years earlier. Why didn’t I care about this one? Think it was because I was disappointed with the third and fourth ones. And this one got bad reviews. It’s Adams being depressed and writing a novel where Arthur Dent is worse depressed than Marvin the Paranoid Android.
• There’s a huge roofed & fenced parking lot full of camper vans and caravans next to Münster Central. Now I know where those summer Germans hibernate between trips to Sweden and Norway.
• Belatedly understood what a weir is. It’s a dam built with the intended purpose of the river pouring over it all the time, creating an artificially raised minimum water level over a stretch of river, but not really a reservoir.
• Getting around in foreign cities is completely different now that Google Maps tells you how to work the public transport system, and you can pay with your debit card.