#Lightning strike on Djurö

Evert Baudou died less than two weeks ago, aged 100. He was a highly productive research scholar and very important as head of department during the Umeå archaeology department's first few decades. My most recently submitted journal paper returns to issues he dealt with in a chapter of his 1960 PhD thesis. A kind and friendly man!

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evert_Baudou

#archaeology

Whorled tickseed, Coreopsis verticillata, Sw. höstöga. It appears to be blooming uncommonly early. I bought the plants less than a year ago. Native to the east-central US.

#gardening #bloomscrolling

First coin found, Charles XIV John, 1/4 skilling, 1820. It's difficult, because there are so many rusty nails everywhere. When I set the detector to ignore those, it loses some general sensitivity. And if not, I can't move for signals.

#archaeology #coins

What we leave behind

#archaeology

I've written three academic books about the area where the Ostlänken high speed railroad is being built, and directed archaeological investigations at like 25 sites. But my combination of academic seniority and very short experience of directing digs specifically for land development (which is sharply distinct from research-motivated fieldwork) makes me unemployable on that vast project. Nobody wants me to manage a project OR dig with the rank and file. 🙄

#archaeology #career

I think I just crashed the dole office's computer by reporting "fully employed" for last week. Unprecedented. But I can't close my account with them until mid-August when I'm unemployed again and run out of dole days.

#Goodmorning from cloudy Fisksätra. Today: diggy diggy hole. And you?

Check this @pseudonym

Swedish tomato plant, Sicilian triskele

#gardening

#bread

Here's the method:

Assign numbers to each shelf in your house and measure their lengths. Divide the sum total by a sensible number of dice pips. In our case, 2000 pips is good because we have 1817 cm of books, so each pip represents 1817/2000=0.91 cm.

Create a table of the shelves' endpoints in dice pips. Like so:

Shelf 1: 152 pips
Shelf 2: 304 pips
Shelf 3: 456 pips

Roll the dice, find the shelf, calculate how many pips from the end you need to measure, multiply by in our case 0.91.

I have devised a method to pick random books off our shelves using dice and a tape measure.

Today the 4D10 told me that I needed to look on shelf number nine, 17.1 cm from the leading end. This gave me a 756-page anthology of Swedish poetry through the ages, published in 1978. Of course, fatter books are more easily hit by a randomiser that just gives you a distance in shelf millimeters. Looking forward to the read over the next few months!

#books #poetry

My mom collects New Age self-help literature. As a small act of resistance, I have put a Poe collection in her bookcase at the summer house. 🤘

#books

"Climbers are conquistadors of the useless"

Lionel Terray

Sweden's largest lake is so shallow that if you draw a straight line through 3D space from one shore to the other, it passes through Earth's crust under the lake basin.

#geography

Considered signing a climate petition for Swedish academics, then realised that the last time I worked in Swedish higher ed was in 2017.
🤷

Om du är forskare eller folkbildare så kan du skriva på ett upprop till stöd för den stora klimatdemonstrationen den 23/8 och för en ambitiös klimatpolitik.

Om du inte är det, men känner nån sån så tipsa dem gärna:
https://enadeforklimatet.nu/

An interesting aspect of translating #Lovecraft is that he used extremely rare words in the full expectation that his Weird Tales audience wouldn't understand them. He could have written scaly and wrinkled, but he chose squamous and rugose for horrific effect. His horrors were indescribable to such an extent that he didn't even want the reader to understand his descriptions. And this is part of the translator's task too.

#translation #horror #writing

US Nazis wear masks because they are afraid of antifascist activists. It's not because they secretly believe that what they're doing is shameful or whatever else, it's because of the constant and vigilant work of antifascists. If at some point they believe they have nothing to fear from antifascists then they will march without masks.