Littering
Littering really annoys me, indoors, in the streets, in parks – and particularly in woods and wilderness. My whole family often collects bagfuls of garbage on walks or visits to the lake. I can’t...
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Ship Spotting
Last Wednesday this brig came past my mom’s summer house off Bullandö in the Stockholm archipelago. It’s the Eye of the Wind, built in 1911 at Brake in Lower Saxony and originally christened...
View ArticleNigerian T-Shirt Scam?
The t-shirt deal is starting to look like a Nigerian scam. The original offer was that I would get some free printed t-shirts from Ooshirts.com if I advertised about their site. Now have a load of...
View ArticleSwedish Humanities Graduates Face Dim Financial Prospects
I read a recent report from the Swedish Institute of Futures Studies titled Humanisterna och framtidssamhället, “Humanities Scholars and Society in the Future” (freely available as a PDF). I found some...
View ArticleI Got A Uni Job
My professional goal since undergraduate days 20 years ago has been to divide my working hours between indoor research, fieldwork and teaching. And so I applied for my first academic job in June of...
View ArticleSubway Tweaker Woman
Riding the subway back into town today after a morning of looking at sites with an old course mate, I became aware of a loud woman a few seats away who would not sit still. Skinny, early middle age,...
View ArticleNice Try, Science Publishing Group
Science Publishing Group is another scam Open Access journal publisher or academic vanity press. Yesterday they sent me a form-letter invitation to submit papers or become member of an unspecified...
View ArticleScam OA Journals: Who’s Fooling Whom?
Two years ago I was dismayed to find that a pair of crank authors had managed to slip a pseudo-archaeological paper into a respected geography journal. Last spring they seemed to have pulled off the...
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Saltsjöbaden Train / House Crash
Damn, I must have ridden those very train carriages thousands of times! The crash happened just four stops up the commuter train line from where I live. My wife and I went there this morning with our...
View ArticleLet’s Talk About Kachingle
The Kachingle social micropayment site has been nagging me periodically for the past year. It’s something along the lines of Flattr, and finally I thought OK, let’s try this out. All they want from me...
View ArticleTransparent Recruitment Charade
2009. University of Lund publishes the PhD thesis Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning in Created Agricultural Wetlands, dealing with biological diversity and ecosystem services in ponds in the...
View ArticleOn My Mind
I’ve got a lot on my mind. Bronze Age deposition book: visiting some sites on Friday, data collection almost done, have started doing stat analysis and writing interpretations, need to write gazetteer...
View ArticleUrban Decay in Istanbul
Last winter I was amazed by the poor upkeep afforded to buildings in central Marrakech. I spent part of last week in fascinating Istanbul, and there it was again: plentiful ruins of recent buildings in...
View ArticleTell Me What Podcasts To Try
I’ve suddenly and catastrophically gotten tired of most of my favourite podcasts, removing them from the subscriptions list in Podkicker on my smartphone. It’s a lot like breaking up with friends of...
View ArticleInfinite Etiquette Recursion On Staircase
Wolf warrior David Huggins reminded me of the greatest conundrum in finer etiquette: how a gentleman should behave when approaching the lower end of a narrow staircase while in conversation with a...
View ArticleNot Great Impulse Control, Not Great Planning
Here are two pages out of this week’s Swedish crime chronicle, showcasing the rare beauties of the small-town criminal mind. Both remind me of the movie Fargo in different ways. The first one is...
View ArticleBirger’s Friday Link Roundup
“Early Clovis knew their land and stone” — Of course they bloody did! Finding a site with good obsidian would have been like striking oil today. People would have kept track of the site, and traded...
View ArticleKalmar Campus Break Room View
This is the view from the staff break room in the humanities building at the Kalmar campus of the Linnaeus University. To the lower left is the university building. I haven’t been here much during the...
View ArticleBirger’s Friday Link Roundup
Ikea’s typhoon rescue relief outguns China’s. Nope. Not surprised that their government does not care much. China Ends One-Child Policy. “Viking-age” ‘gold men’ unearthed in Sweden”. Actually, a bit...
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Woods Porn Deposition
When I was a kid around 1980 me and my buddies used to play in small tracts of woodland around where we lived. There we sometimes found woods porn, Sw. skogsporr: damp and fragmented pornographic...
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