https://aardvarchaeology.wordpress.com/2026/06/27/june-pieces-of-my-mind-2-12/
#blogging
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June Pieces Of My Mind #2
Boxholm Ironworks MuseumAmong concert sound technicians, Ulf Lundell’s guitar playing used to be known as “the white noise channel”. It’s a particular summer feeling on a June day with lots of greenery, but overcast and a little drizzle. Mad King Erik, who suffered from paranoid delusion, believed that homeless beggars might be spies. There was a market for garden plants in 1560s Stockholm. The town’s poor house bought them for its kitchen garden. Plants, not seeds. One of the bell ringers in Stockholm’s main church in 1566 was a woman named Margit (= Margaret). Beer tax records suggest that she may have kept a tavern too. Bell ringers needed to be both strong and heavy to counterbalance the bell. No waifs needed apply. All Catholic churches dedicated to Saint Nicholas, such as Old Stockholm’s town church, are homes to the cult of Santa Claus. One reason that it’s so hard to be a conscious consumer is that issues you care about can clash with each other. What’s good for the environment isn’t automatically good for animal ethics. What’s good for the climate isn’t automatically good for the microplastics issue. Having regionally produced ecological produce delivered by van in small quantities to your suburban home is probably really bad for the environment, because it’s wildly inefficient. I’ve just signed a 6-month contract to work as a collections curator for Västmanland County Museum. It’s in Västerås, the country’s sixth largest city. My office will be at the satellite storage facility in nearby Hallstahammar. Västmanland formed part of the core ancient tribal territory of the Swedes that lent their name to the current much larger kingdom, and has rich archaeology. I should emphasise that there is no parallel to be drawn between me and Hank von Helvete, the hard-living lead singer of Turbonegro, who retired from the band to become a rural museum curator. 😁 The application that got me this job was number 99 over a period of 20 months. This isn’t quite as depressing or labour-intensive as it sounds. Because many of those applications were as high-school teacher, where you just click-click-send, and where I have no formal qualifications. I applied because I have to submit six applications each month to stay on the dole, and because I’ve taught quite happily at two high schools in recent years. There aren’t six archaeology job listings a month. Rhubarb. Nasty stuff. Just bake an apple pie and everybody will be happier! Rhubarb was originally cultivated for the laxative properties of its root. We should return to this view of the plant, where the leaf stalks are irrelevant. And since we no longer believe in Galenic medicine, we have little need for laxatives. Thus we could just stop growing that thing altogether. Books are a good invention. 👍️ I wondered before we went to the concert last Friday if a klezmer band has to say anything about Palestine during their gigs. This one did not. But instead of a merch table, they had a table for a children in war charity. ❤️ I would like to see no bailouts at all after this crash please. Eyehategod’s guitarist looks a lot like the elderly Sir Richard Francis Burton in his Trieste days. Capitalism is the economic system with market crashes and extreme economic inequality. I have this unsubstantiated impression that people from poor countries seem to have an unusual number of disabled children. Thinking about this, I remembered, oh, right, prenatal screening. You don’t get that in Burundi or Malawi. The reason that my kids were carried to term is that they were screened and not selectively aborted efter the evaluation. There’s actually a debate about this in Down Syndrome relative associations. There has never been such a low percentage of Downies in the West. Is string theory still being funded and still unable to make any empirically testable predictions? 13 weeks until Sweden votes out the useless Kristersson government. The coalition is already falling apart. The other day they had to withdraw a piece of flagship fascist legislation because four “Liberal” MPs informed party leadership that they wouldn’t obey the party whip if it came to a vote. The Conservatives and the Fascist Small Town Working Men have the weirdest policy for housing production. “We don’t want to build apartment buildings, because polls show that people prefer to own small houses.” Yes, but those polls didn’t ask if people believed that they would ever be able to afford to own a small house. They will not. It’s academic what they would prefer. The Fascists’ core electorate has very little money. It’s all just so stupid. Huge depositions of 1st century BC metalwork from https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/vehicles-of-change-two-exceptional-deposits-of-destroyed-chariots-or-wagons-from-late-iron-age-britain/729BB6B21858170704D32CBDBF68C5DA">destroyed wagons found near York and next to a top-level British hillfort settlement. Here’s my new media project. I’m going to grow grossly obese and start a YouTube channel where I hand out parodically misogynistic dating advice. I’ll be known as THE MANOSPHERE. It’s a winner, huh? In the process of carrying out the Reformation, King Gustavus I personally stole thousands of farms from the Church under the pretence that they had been donated by ancestors of his. His father’s estate had been 90 farms. Gustavus’s estate ended up at 5,227 farms. This became a problem for his successor, Mad King Erik. He had to share this inheritance with his siblings. So he transferred about 2,500 farms to the Crown and selected noblemen. So Gustavus’s reflexive land amassment didn’t serve its purpose long-term. He didn’t trust that the Crown would be himself and his heirs, so he stole that land from the public sector to control it. But his heir and successor had to hand it back over to the public sector, also in order to control it. The issue wasn’t settled until after the dynasty’s male line died out in 1672. Then the land holdings were all transferred to the Crown. Jethro Tull’s 1987 song “Budapest” is a Dire Straits song with some flute. The loans are many and exact. Today is another Buy Nothing Day. I’m reading a library book for my fiction project and taking notes in a little book my daughter left behind when decamping for tech school. ❤️ I am an exceptionally disloyal member of the Swedish Writers’ Union, because I very rarely read any new books in Swedish. This country’s literature scene would collapse in short order if my taste became the mainstream. But where are the Swedish equivalents of Michael Chabon, Mary Roach, Elizabeth Hand, Susanna Clarke, Emily St. John Mandel, Cory Doctorow, Bill Bryson, Jon Ronson, Jonathan Howard? Stark reminder that what RPG rules you use matters a lot to the resulting stories. Hot Springs Island, though system-agnostic, is at heart an old-school D&D module. With those rules, combat is survivable, and players are highly motivated to kill monsters and take their treasure to gain Experience Points. But I’ve run this campaign using a mid-80s version of BRP Magic World. Combat is lethal, there is nothing to gain from killing monsters, and we have stopped counting treasure. With D&D, you get characters who seek out the island’s underground complexes to kill the inhabitants and loot them. With BRP, you get characters who avoid underground complexes entirely unless they’re convinced that there are story-relevant clues to be had there. It’s June 2026 and though I’m a big fan of analytical machine learning, I still see no use case for generative LLM chatbots. This distinction should be front and centre in all discussions of the technology. Because of failing nativity, the municipality has closed the school me and my kids went to. There is no longer a janitor. Bushes are expanding into the paths. The original disco audience is 75 now. Boney M are on the cover of the old-folks magazine Kvällsstunden. One of my dad’s best buddies died last week, aged 84. They used to win yacht races together in Carl-Axel’s little boat when they were in their 40s and 50s. Lidingö runt, Tjörn runt, year after year. Hardly anyone in power right now worldwide is competent or trustworthy. What sets dictatorships apart here is that their citizens are not to blame for who has the power. Unlike for instance Sweden. Sweden has a senseless proliferation of archaeology departments. There’s one for every 1.3 million inhabitants here. In Denmark, that number is 1 per 3.0 million. In Poland, it’s 1 per 4.1 million. In 1566 there were two gunpowder mills at Nacka mill stream. Both burned down in May of that year. The municipality I live in is named for that early industrial site. Because it had a chapel, and the current municipality is a continuation of the chapel congregation. In Lysekil the World Wildlife Fund and the municipal aquarium Havets Hus run a breeding programme for the small-spotted catshark, Scyliorhinus caniculus, Sw. småfläckig rödhaj. And they put on an annual Shark Release event! I was surprised to learn that this fish species is doing great, and that the breeding programme serves the purpose of studying the sharks’ movements. Every fish they release has an ID tag. Fletcher Pratt (1897-1956) seems to be best remembered for his 1948 fantasy novel The Well of the Unicorn. It has by far the most ratings on Goodreads of his books. Sadly though, it doesn’t seem to be very good, scoring only 3.4 out of 5. Does anyone except the Swedish Writers’ Union call machine translation “AI”? Confuses the hell out of me when they say “Our members worry about AI” and they mean Google Translate. The primary sense of the adjective “elite”, according to Merriam-Webster, is this: “of, relating to, serving, or being part of the choice part or the best of a class”. I was surprised when I talked to someone who thought the word meant “rich”. Drove past a store with the surreal word SOFFKONCEPT on the front. Buy a Sofa Concept. Buy it today! Swedish farmers put in grotesquely enormous amounts of labour to clear stones from their marginally fertile fields. The clearance cairns and field walls survive for ever.
