Salto sobrius

Continued Elsewhere

2007-04-14T07:27:00.000+02:00

Starting 29 December 2006, my blogging is done at Aardvarchaeology. The Salto feed occasionally wakes up for a few days when I'm on the road and need to post entries by e-mail with my handheld computer. I move such material to Aardvarchaeology, and illustrate it, after a trip is over.

Scienceblogger

2006-12-29T23:52:00.000+01:00

Dear Reader, I have joined the Scienceblogs stable where I will continue to blog under the by-line Aardvarchaeology. Scienceblogs is a blog portal run by the American pop-sci journal Seed. Please join me there! This site will remain on-line as an archive.

Early Medieval Thuringia

2006-12-28T08:25:00.000+01:00

The kingdom of the Thuringians in Central Germany flourished briefly during the 5th century AD and came to a sticky end in AD 531 at the hands of the Merovingian Franks. One of the modern German Bundesländer carries its name. Back in October, a conference on early Thuringia took place at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität in Jena, focusing on archaeology, linguistics and historical research. For summaries of the papers check out this on-line Vorbericht (in German).

[More blog entries about archaeology, Germany; arkeologi, Tyskland.]

Erik Davis

2006-12-27T20:07:00.000+01:00

I recently read Californian writer Erik Davis's latest book and really liked it. (There's a review lined up for my new blog.) Then I found the man's web site, with 15 years' worth of feature journalism available on-line. Great stuff, highly recommended! Davis writes a lot about mysticism, drugs, religion and the intersection of these themes. I take an outsider's anthropological interest in such issues, and although Davis has more of a stoner's and zen student's perspective, he writes so well that I gladly follow him. Check him out!

[More blog entries about books; böcker.]

Stinking Bishop

2006-12-26T16:46:00.000+01:00

Toward the end of the 2005 Wallace & Gromit feature film, Wallace is revived after an accident by the smell of a cheese named Stinking Bishop. To my considerable surprise, this cheese actually exists. And to my delight, it can be mail-ordered worldwide over the internet, along with a very healthy selection of similarly hard-core cheeses, from Teddington Cheese, Middlesex, England!

"Stinking Bishop [...] has a sticky yellow-orange rind and smells of old socks. The paste is soft and creamy, the flavour is delicious and, although full and distinctive, it is not quite as pungent as the odour may imply! At certain times of year the paste becomes firmer and slightly crumbly. The cheese is similar to the famous French Epoisses which has been banned from the public transport system in Paris."

Having 750 grams of Stinking Bishop delivered to my door in the Stockholm suburbs would cost me £42, $83, €63, SEK 560. This translates to SEK 750 per kilogram. A pretty stiff price, but I know people who could and would pay it.

Here's a piece from the Guardian about the maker of the cheese, who was nervous about whether he would be able to meet the increased demand for his product in the wake of the film.

[More blog entries about food, cheese, film,England; mat, ost, film,England.]

Christmas Soft Drink Wars

2006-12-25T19:03:00.000+01:00

The traditions and imagery of Anglo-American Christmas are largely Victorian and urban in origin: Dickens's Christmas Carol, C.C. Moore's Santa poem, eggnog, coal-fed fire places and chimneys, etc. These motifs have spread around the world, but they encounter other Christmas traditions along the way, and some prove resistant.

Swedish Christmas carries strong connotations of rural pre-industrial life. Our Santa Claus is actually a mutated version of a protective sprite that used to be the farmer's little helper: tomtegubben, the "old man of the home plot". Our presents, julklappar, "Christmas doorknocks", are the descendants of prank presents tossed through the front door of the farmhouse after a quick knock. We decorate our houses with billygoats and other ornaments made of straw. Our traditional Christmas food is almost entirely based on lo-tech methods of food preservation, with salted, cured and smoked meats and fish. The only vegetables are such as store well (cabbage, apples), or, in the case of kale, grönkål, can be picked all through the winter in the garden as it stands tall over the snow.

The other day, as I was shopping for Christmas food, I found evidence that Swedish Christmas traditions have actually managed to beat the Coca Cola Company.

In Sweden a soft drink is sold at Christmas and Easter that is perceived as a traditional part of the old-time rural Christmas complex. Julmust is dark, very sweet, carbonated, seasoned with malt and a tiny bit of hops -- not enough to give it the bitter edge of beer. It's sort of a caricatured stout for kids. And for years, Coca Cola has tried to muscle in on this seasonal soft-drink market with it's flagship product, a beverage that is actually quite similar to julmust. But they haven't made much headway. Most Swedes perceive Coca Cola as quite incompatible with a traditional Christmas. CC is seen as part of post-war modernity and consumerist culture: it's the opposite of authenticity. Drinking Coke at Christmas would be a bit like erecting a model space shuttle rocket instead of a Christmas tree and playing electronic dance music while the presents are opened.

So what's a poor old soft-drink multinational supposed to do? If you can't beat them, join them.

Since at least 2004, Swedish supermarkets have offered large handsome bottles of Bjäremust brand julmust around Christmas. The label design screams AUTHENTIC, RURAL and OLD TIMEY. Bjäre is a rich agricultural district in Scania, southernmost Sweden, and unmistakeably Scandinavian simply through the name's orthography. And who, you may ask, offers this fine julmust to the authenticity-seeking Christmas celebrant? The Coca Cola Company.

I put the Bjäremust bottle back on the shelf and got some Spendrups, after checking that they hadn't put aspartame in it.

[More blog entries about Christmas, softdrinks, Sweden; julen, julmust.]

Christmas Geocaching

2006-12-25T16:38:00.000+01:00

Geocachers sometimes put huge effort into temporary caches that are available only for a few weeks and then removed. The first one I encountered was a lovingly elaborated Easter Egg cache at Velamsund not far from where I live, which myself and the ladies of my family logged one sunny day last spring. Some of these super-rich caches even form annual series, such as the Trollvinter caches west of Stockholm.

Two of Sweden's most active geocachers call themselves Moomin and Snork Maiden after Tove Jansson's wonderful fantasy books. Hide a cache in some far-off location, protect it with a complicated puzzle involving differential calculus, and you can still count on Moomin finding it within hours. The man always keeps climbing equipment, an inflatable boat and other useful gear in the back of his car.

"Trollvinter" is a short story in Jansson's 1962 collection Det osynliga barnet (Eng. Tales from Moominvalley). Here the Moomins wake up from hibernation in the middle of winter and find all their neighbours in a tizzy over the approach of Christmas. The Moomins, never having heard of this before, interpret "Christmas" as a threatening being that is on its way to the Moomin Valley and must be appeased with offerings of food and presents.

The Trollvinter caches are far more peaceful in tone. Moomin and Snork Maiden select a small spruce tree in the middle of the Lovö woods, decorate it lavishly, adorn it with electric candles and wire it up to a car battery with an ingenious switch. Then they put a plastic crate full of little presents under the tree.

In order to find this year's Trollvinter cache me and my pal Lars had to wander through the woods, passing a series of tests on Moomin lore. Every station is marked with a little electrical lamp controlled by a photosensor. When you lift the final lamp from its stand to read the question underneath, you trigger the Christmas tree's candles. A beautiful surprise after dark!

Dear Reader, I wish you a merry yet supremely peaceful Christmas. Luckily, that's what I'm having myself. And meanwhile, I'm stockpiling longer blog entries for the new site, which I hope to have on-line some time within two weeks from now.

[More blog entries about geocaching, christmas, Sweden; geocaching, julen.]

Remote Central

2006-12-23T13:37:00.000+01:00

Tim Jones knows how to blog, but he doesn't know how to market his way out of a shallow cliff overhang on Timor.

For two years, the Londoner has blogged at Remote Central about archaeology and palaeoanthropology and astronomy in an entertaining manner, illustrated with lots of cool pix. Yet his site remains a little-known oasis in the desert reaches of inane prattle that are the bloggy-spear.

Dear Reader, get thee to Remote Central, read it, comment on it, and link to it. Or me and my posse of crackhead niggaz gonna get Lower Palaeolithic on yo' ass, tru dat.

[More blog entries about archaeology; arkeologi.]

Overheard in Stockholm

2006-12-23T09:19:00.000+01:00

Sweden's version of Overheard in New York is found at Tjuvlyssnat.se. The other day they had a tidbit that I really like.

(A subway train stops at the Östermalmstorg platform and the doors open.)

Driver: "... and watch out if you enter carriage number one. The floor may be slippery. It will probably also smell of fish, because someone's sat down and cleaned a salmon."

[More blog entries about humour, Sweden; humor.]

Radiocarbon for Christmas

2006-12-22T18:49:00.000+01:00

Back in September I told you about a little dig that I did with my friends and colleagues Howard, Libby and Peter at Stora Tollstad, Sjögestad parish, Östergötland. We dug a small peripheral trial trench into a great barrow (Raä 16) and found a thick charcoal layer underneath it.

Yesterday Tomasz Goslar of the Poznan Radiocarbon Lab sent me the results of analyses of charcoal from the barrow. Ulf Strucke had kindly identified two pieces for me with a low innate age: one of Norway Spruce (Picea abies, Sw. gran) and one of Goat Willow (Salix caprea, Sw. sälg). The willow material, being a thin twig, should date the cremation pyre at the site (although we found no bones at its periphery). And the analyses came out beautifully!

Spruce. Poz-18592. 1265±30 BP. 685-775 cal AD (1 s).
Willow. Poz-18593. 1210±30 BP. 775-875 cal AD (1 s).

The Sjögestad barrow was clearly erected in the late 8th or the 9th century AD, that is, the Late Vendel or Early Viking Period. This fits well with the dates of similar barrows in the Lake Mälaren area and rules out a Bronze Age date, the other big barrow period in Swedish prehistory. And behind every great barrow lurks a powerful group of mourners...

[More blog entries about archaeology, vikingperiod, Sweden; arkeologi, vikingatiden, Östergötland.]

Four Stone Hearth

2006-12-20T19:20:00.000+01:00

The fifth instalment of the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Nomadic Thoughts. Lots to read about archaeology and anthropology! I'm hosting it myself two months from now.

[More blog entries about archaeology, carnivals; arkeologi.]

Going Pro?

2006-12-20T19:00:00.000+01:00

Dear Reader, I am excited. I have been offered to move this blog from Blogger.com to a high-profile venue elsewhere.

This would mean that I'd have to start again from zero on the blog's Technorati and Google rankings, as they are tied to the current URL. But the Blogger site's ranking would still help pull in readers who would find a re-direction link to the new site. Which would in turn attract more traffic than the old site simply by being where it is. So reaching the current rankings again would most likely not take a whole year.

Another question bothered me more. Would they make me change my blogging habits? Perhaps ask me to write more about this and less about that? No, apparently not. They want me to continue doing what I do.

And then there's a money issue. These people would stick ads on the blog and make a small profit off it. Would any of that trickle down to me? Apparently yes. Certainly not big money, but getting paid at all to blog would be pretty neat, don't you think? And blogging at the new place would mean greater visibility and thus possibly generate revenue indirectly through speaking engagements, review copies and promotional freebies.

So you can see why I'm excited. I'll let you know more when things solidify!

[More blog entries about blogging; blogga.]

Tangled Bank 69: War on Christmas

2006-12-20T10:00:00.000+01:00

Our verdant Tangled Bank makes war on Christmas. It's hitting Kris Kringle with all it's got, strengthened by global warming. It will not cease until lush rainforest grows up to the very foundations of St Nicholas's icy fastness at the North Pole, and his elves all take up bikini-waxing! We will not rest until Yuletide celebrations involve fruity drinks with paper umbrellas, Hawaii shirts and surfing! Then we shall bask in the light of the midnight sun, at the balmy shores of a tepid North Atlantic, as we gloat over our victory upon the red-clad hohoho's son and his polar-bear minions.

Dear Reader, this is Salto sobrius: the world's #4 archaeology blog and #5 skepticism blog. Today I bring you the 69th Tangled Bank blog carnival. Enjoy!

Medicine

Charlie at Science and Reason comments on the Harvard Health Letter's Top-10 health stories of 2006.
Mark of the Skwib obsesses wittily over recent penile science.
The Fibromyalgia Research Blog reports on new advances in pain alleviation for fibromyalgia patients.

Culture & Tech

Brian at Backseat Driving offers E.T.'s opinions on a recent pronouncement by Reverend P.Z. Myers regarding the improbability of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Your very own carnival host waves about a new excavation report on an unusual archaeological site: a High Medieval farmstead in Sweden with finds and features indicating aristocratic contacts. And evidence that they didn't celebrate Christmas! (Sort of. Actually, no, not really. Sorry.)

Animals

Mike at 10 000 Birds forgets about Christmas. He suggests we all spend the season staring at chicks. And counting them.
Sunil at Balancing Life tells us about new research into sexual selection.
Jenn at Invasive Species offers links on Australia's feral camels. What better cavalry in the War on Christmas?
Tim at Walking the Berkshires discusses the nuisance that is semi-urban crow flocks.
Josh at Thoughts from Kansas mourns the effectively extinct Baiji dolphin.
P.Z. at Pharyngula takes us through new research into the evolution of vascular systems. Is a vertebrate an upside-down invertebrate?
Bora/Coturnix at A Blog Around the Clock reports on new discoveries in how mammal brains keep time with the universe.

Fungi

Jbruno at the Voltage Gate tells us why fun guys form rings: fairy rings!

Cell biology

Alex at the Daily Transcript lays out the latest news about ribosome-SRP-signal sequence structures. Makes a man glad to have endoplasmic reticuli.

Climate

Daphne at Arne Naess Was Right reports on new computer models of our melting polar ice caps. Take that, Christmas!
Beau at Seasons Under the Sun also ponders global warming.
As does Paddy K:

"I like to give people a chance, but any fuckwit who can look around in this 10-degree December and not notice that something is fucked up with the world, is just not worth any more of my air, and is clearly beyond help."

The next Tangled Bank will open on J.R.R. Tolkien's birthday (3 January) at Viva la Evolucion! Don't miss it -- just don't. And until then: don't forget your kerosene can. You never know when you'll come across an indoor evergreen tree that needs liberatin'.

Update on Christmas Day: O jeez, I thought Santa was called "Chris Pringle". That, it turns out, is the name of many people including "one of the prime movers in Oxford Falls Christian City Church" -- but not of the obese reindeer fancier. Now I'm embarrassed.

[More blog entries about science, carnival, tangledbank; vetenskap.]

Suliman Speaks

2006-12-19T20:13:00.000+01:00

Among this blog's most popular entries is a very early one from December 2005 about the Evil of Kjell and Lisa. Today I received e-mail from Suliman Cassimjee who feels that Kjell and Lisa have indeed done him much wrong. Mr Cassimjee wishes to correct me on a point I made, as follows.

Mr Martin Rundkvist,

COPY TO THE SCIENTOLOGY´s ORGANIZATION (CALLED RELIGIOUS TECHNOLOGY CENTER) THAT RECEIVES REPORTS CONCERNING THE ATTACKS OF KJELL Wxxxxxxx AND LISA Axxxxxx.

Dear Sir,

According to the information you placed on the internet "..... Kjell and Lisa appear to be high-ranking Scientologists.....". Please note, Kjell and Lisa are not high ranking Scientologist. I have a copy of a letter from SCIENTOLOGY that states approximately that KJELL AND LISA are declared as being the CRIMNAL type of PERSONALITIES and they do NOT HAVE THE RIGHTS OF BEING MEMBERS OF THE church for the crimes that they are committing.

With respects,
Yours sincerely,
Suliman Cassimjee.

[More blog entries about scientology, Sweden; scientologi.]

Develop a Richer Understanding of Stuff

2006-12-19T19:32:00.000+01:00

Reading the introduction to a new book written by a fellow archaeologist, I'm reminded of how far some members of our little academic minority within archaeology are from the contract archaeology mainstream.

Archaeology, to my mind, is about looking at old things to find out what life was like a long time ago. This is the sole rationale of field archaeology and museum collections. We look for patterns in the archaeological record, we formulate as plausible interpretations as possible, and we anchor them as robustly as possible in the data at hand. Then we dig some more and confront our old interpretations with new data, revising our ideas as we go along. As Mats P. Malmer put it, "archaeology asymptotically approaches the truth about the past".

Not so in my colleague's view. Important goals of his book are:

to "develop a richer understanding"
that it "attempts to show the importance of developing a theorised and imaginative engagement with the ... archaeological record"
to "provide exciting new interpretations"

I find these phrases completely alien. To me there is only one kind of science, the one that aims to find out what the world truly is and has been like. I view this as a complicated enterprise in any subject, where scientists will often hurry down the wrong path for a while until they realise their mistake and get back on track toward the truth. But a "richer" understanding has nothing to do with it. Imagination comes into science only when we formulate hypotheses and devise experiments. A theorised engagement with the source material is the only one possible, and so needn't be emphasised, as no sentient being ever engages with anything without preconceived ideas. And whether an interpretation is exciting or not, new or old, is completely irrelevant: the question is if it's more plausible than the others, and above all, testable.

The author I'm reading suggests that the challenge for the next decade within his entire field of study would be to "move towards considering" a series of concepts that simply look outlandish and arbitrary to me. He isn't introducing new testable hypotheses and he isn't offering new data to test old ones. He isn't arguing that any earlier interpretations regarding concrete events in the past are actually wrong. His goal seems to be to teach his readers a new vocabulary where everyday words have subtly new meanings, and to convince them that it would be valuable to talk about the source material in his terms. To me it all looks like literary criticism, aesthetics, a glass bead game.

[More blog entries about archaeology; arkeologi.]

High Medieval Farmstead

2006-12-18T16:33:00.000+01:00

Iron wire brooch from Sommaränge, 14th century AD. Diam 27 mm.

The other day I received a copy of a new excavation report, produced by a number of close friends and dear colleagues at the SAU excavation unit in Uppsala. Three years ago, Emelie Schmidt Wikborg headed the excavation of a High Medieval farmstead at Sommaränge in Viksta parish, Uppland. I visited the dig once together with Emelie's hubby, my friend Jonas Wikborg, and I've followed the post-ex work, so it's great to see what came of it.

The building remains were pretty woolly due to the rural Medieval habit of erecting houses on wooden frames supported on easily removed stones instead of the age-old way with postholes. But there had been at least five houses including a smithy, and in addition there was a still-functioning well and the remains of a simple brick kiln. The site produced unusually many finds, including a surprising amount of metalwork with an aristocratic flavour: weaponry, spurs, dress ornaments, furniture mounts, combs and lots of horseshoes. This was at least partly thanks to the wise use of metal detectors before and after de-turfing. Check out the finds drawings by the great Stefan Kayat, who illustrated my doctoral thesis! The people who lived here were clearly a cut above the standard Medieval peasant.

The reasons that I like Sommaränge particularly are a) the number and quality of the small finds, which are always close to my heart, and b) the fact that the farmstead can pretty confidently be identified with a place mentioned from 1323 to 1482 in the written sources. It subsequently disappeared from the records: Giplinghe farm, or as it would be written in modern Swedish, Gipplinge. The excavation area was on the border of two villages that have historically fought over the land, probably because the marginal Gipplinge's demise did not take place in such a way that the rights to its land were entirely clear afterwards.

The dig also covered graves from the Bronze Age and Migration Period along with Late Neolithic and Bronze Age settlement remains, including a number of impressive burnt-stone mounds and rare Early Bronze Age metalwork. These prehistoric remains are treated in a separate report by Camilla Forsman and Helena Victor that hasn't appeared yet.

Emelie's a resourceful person. She keeps moving in and out of field archaeology and thus never seems to be unemployed: for a while she worked in the telecoms industry, then back to the trenches, and now she's with the state property management service. She's also an ex-punk chick and a rural culture geek who knows how to sing the cows home, milk them and make cheese. No wonder Jonas grabbed hold of her on her first dig and hasn't let go since.

The report isn't on-line here yet, but if you're into the real Middle Ages beyond the tournaments and castles and banquets, then you should get hold of a copy. Good stuff that you don't see every day.

Schmidt Wikborg, Emelie. 2006. Från gård och grund uppå Sommaränge Skog. Medeltida bebyggelselämningar i Viksta socken, Uppland. SAU Skrifter 15. Uppsala. 224 pp. ISBN 91-975994-4-1.

[More blog entries about archaeology, medieval, Sweden; arkeologi, medeltiden.]

Upcoming Blog Carnival

2006-12-16T15:35:00.000+01:00

Dear Reader, do you blog? Do you want more exposure, more readers, more links?

Well, have you written anything good lately that relates to the life sciences? Then submit it to me for inclusion in the next edition of the massively popular Tangled Bank blog carnival! I'm putting it on-line on Wednesday 20 December.

[More blog entries about blogging, carnivals; blogga.]

Blog Birthday

2006-12-16T14:17:00.000+01:00

A year ago, at 19:18 in the evening, I posted my first entry on this blog. Blogging soon became one of my favourite pastimes, and I've been posting a bit more than one entry a day on average. Half a year ago in June, I was feeling a little glum about the readership figures. Little did I know that this was a vacation slump -- the blog's been booming ever since. This has been due to a combination of a) my hosting of popular blog carnivals, b) the increasing number of hits from Google searches on sundry themes as the blog's Google ranking rises (it's currently 4/10) and I type more potential search terms into the thing. Simply put: after a year of blogging, the chance is greater that I've used the words someone happens to search for.

Readership: the median number of daily unique readers for the past two weeks is 207, of whom 38 are returning readers. These figures are highly dependent on whether I've been hosting any carnivals: for October they were 225 and 59. Very few regulars seem to read the blog on a daily basis, so to hazard a guess I'd say there should be about a hundred regulars who check in at least once a week. But it's still a bit of a mystery to me why the regulars count doesn't grow. It's not that I don't promote the blog, and it's not that the blog attracts no new regulars. My guess is that I'm losing one regular for every new one that joins us, and that this means that people get tired of reading this blog after a while, even if they really like it at first. Perhaps they lose interest when they find out that I don't concentrate heavily on archaeology and skepticism? Or, more optimistically, they may get tired of reading blogs at all.

Links: on Technorati, with links from 171 individual sites in the past six months, Salto sobrius is currently ranked about number 19 000 out of 63 million. It's the number four archaeology blog and the number five skepticism blog on the web.

Comments: keep 'em coming! And I still haven't seen any requests. You know what to do. Actually: if you're a returning reader, please comment on this entry and tell me what kind of material you'd like to see more of. You can be anonymous if you want to.

[More blog entries about blogging; blogga.]

Welcome Bergh's Students

2006-12-15T14:00:00.000+01:00

Here's a link page that I used during a talk about internet culture to advertising students on 15 December. This blog entry will move down the page as I write new ones, but I'll leave the link page on-line. Bookmark it in your browser!

If you, Dear Reader, weren't at the talk and still want to hear my comments on the links, I'd be very happy to give more talks on the subject at the venue of your choice.

Mats Widgren, Blogger

2006-12-14T14:06:00.000+01:00

Professor Mats Widgren is a human geographer and a really nice guy. (I'm not just saying that because as a member of the Academy of Letters he's actually sort of my employer.) We're neighbours in Fisksätra and sometimes we chat on the train to town. I just found out that Mats has a blog. He's into prehistoric and early historic human geography, and so is actually an archaeologist in disguise. So there's a lot of archaeological interest at his site.

I was particularly interested in his view of Jan Henric Fallgren's and Maria Petersson's radical opinions about a late date for the Stone Wall fossil landscapes of south-eastern Scandinavia. They're usually viewed as active during the Late Roman and Migration Periods (c. AD 150-550), and that's the date that Mats prefers. He hasn’t been blogging very frequently, but if you give Mats some comments maybe he’ll take the hint.

[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden; arkeologi.]

Land of Four Thousand Archaeologists

2006-12-14T11:03:00.000+01:00

My good friend and mentor Jan Peder Lamm has a thing for bibliographies. Specifically, he’s been the driving force behind a series of volumes listing photocopied BA and MA theses written by Swedish students of archaeology and adjoining disciplines. Many of these works contain very respectable research, with useful databases and thoughtful analyses. Thanks to Jan Peder’s efforts (and those of his disciples, including myself), they are far more accessible than they would have been if they had just been lying around the department store rooms.

It struck me the other day that these bibliographies allow one to estimate how many archaeologists Sweden has produced since the 1940s, assuming a BA or MA in the subject as a prerequisite for the moniker. I’m interested in this because of my strong opinions on the high unemployment rate in the profession. This is to my mind a result of a university system that strives to maximize student throughput and teacher employment rates without any view to whether the kids learn anything that might help them have a subsequent career.

There are sources of error: some theses may have been missed, and some people are listed both for their BA and their MA theses. But we should be able to see the order of magnitude. Let’s just look at theses in Scandinavian archaeology, which are the ones written by people who hope to work as archaeologists in Sweden.

For the period 1950-2003, the bibliographies list 4371 theses. They document decades of slow growth, and then a dramatic peak in the 1990s, when on average 87 theses where written each year only about the Iron Age. There is then an encouraging slump for 2000-2003, with an annual average of 63 Iron Age theses. Nevertheless, there must be thousands of people with archaeology BAs or MAs in the country, most of whom are not yet past retirement age. And believe me, there are not thousands of archaeology jobs: there may be two or three hundred. So it seems that in recent years, Sweden has had an overproduction of archaeologists on a rough scale of 10:1. Though the application numbers to recent jobs are more like 90:1.

I say, let's put a few tens of archaeology teachers on the dole, thereby stopping the university system from providing hundreds of unexperienced kids each year with a career path leading to unemployment.

[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, career, unemployment; arkeologi, karriär, arbetslöshet.]

The King and the Hoard

2006-12-13T19:49:00.000+01:00

Picture from the must-see Guder og Grave web site on the Danish Bronze Age.

In the December issue of excellent Danish pop-sci archaeology bimonthly Skalk, Bente & Jens Henrik Jønsson tell the tragicomical story of Denmark's largest Early Bronze Age hoard find.

The Smørumovre hoard dates from Montelius's Period II (15th or 14th century BC). It came to light in 1851 near Copenhagen when farmer Peter Sørensen was digging a ditch to drain a bog. He collected 163 bronze objects, most of them axeheads and spearheads, and dutifully took them to the Museum for Nordic Antiquities in town. At this time the museum was still headed by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, the father of archaeology, and housed in a wing of the Christiansborg royal castle. Unfortunately, the museum wasn't open on the day when Sørensen came to call. Instead he was told that there was another person around who collected antiquities and might be interested: King Frederick VII.

Frederick received farmer Sørensen, took a look at the find and immediately bought every single piece of it. This meant that the hoard didn't enter the state collection housed in the museum, but became the property of the king himself. He promptly commissioned an excellent publication of the find by J.J.A. Worsaae, which appeared in 1853. And then, in 1859, the royal apartments at Frederiksborg castle burned down and the king's collection was largely destroyed.

Today, 68 pieces from the Smørumovre hoard survive, most of them fire-damaged to some extent, with splotches of lead from the roof of Frederiksborg. If you didn't already know, you can now see that monarchy is wrong.

[More blog entries about archaeology, bronzeage, Denmark; arkeologi, bronsåldern, Danmark.]

Big Bog Booty

2006-12-12T21:39:00.000+01:00

Another search term that tricks hapless porn surfers into visiting this blog: "bog booty". Happens every day, because I've been writing about war booty sacrifices in bogs. At first I thought this would have something to do with gay cottaging, as "bog" is a British slang word for "toilet". "Booty" of course means, in the words of the Urban Dictionary, "butt, ass, specifically female posterior".

So I did some googling of my own. And it turns out that the bog booty surfers are not actually looking for gay materials. They're just poor typists: O is right beside I on the keyboard. What these gentlemen are really looking for is simply biiiiig booty. A sentiment with which I'm sure we all sympathise most warmly.

[More blog entries about porn, sex, websearching; porr, sex, webbsökning.]

Gingerbread Cult of St Lucy

2006-12-12T21:26:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow's the feast-day of St Lucy, and my son's school started off the celebrations a day early. So this afternoon, along with a lot of other parents, I had saffron buns and watched kids in Ku Klux Klan and Santa outfits form a long line and sing Christmas carols. One end of the line was mostly a few bars ahead of the other.

As a pretty recent tradition, the morning of 13 December is celebrated in Sweden with quite a bit of ceremony. It involves white-robed, predominantly young female carolers led by a candle-crowned girl, performing a specialised repertoire of songs in honour of St Lucy (Sw. Lucia) and St Stephen in addition to generic Christmas carols. Considerable amounts of candles, saffron buns, ginger biscuits, coffee and sometimes mulled wine are consumed in the process. It's a huge deal in kiddie schools and Kindergartens. Flabberghasted Nobel laureates are woken before dawn at their hotels and relentlessly be-carolled.

This very Catholic custom is uniquely Swedish, which may be slightly surprising given the fact that the country has been Protestant since the 16th century. But winter in Sweden is dark and cold, with the weather steadily getting worse through the long autumn months. We really need a Candle Maiden in deep December when we're still a week on the wrong side of the solstice.

Björn Fromén of the Stockholm Tolkien Society translated a combination of the two most common Lucia hymns beautifully into High Elvish (and I just can't believe it's almost ten years since we put it on-line!). Here's the first verse:

Lumna cormóres nar
peler ar mardor,
or ambar alanar
caitar i mordor,
íre mir lóna már
ninquitar lícumar:
Ela i calmacolinde,
Lícumafinde!

And in Swedish:

Natten går tunga fjät
runt gård och stuva.
Kring jord som soln förlät
skuggorna ruva.
Då i vårt mörka hus
stiger med tända ljus
Sankta Lucia.
Sankta Lucia!

The tune is a traditional Neapolitan one, and the original Italian lyrics, coincidentally, are decidedly Tolkienian: Sul mare luccica l'astro d'argento..., "The silver star gleams over the sea...".

[More blog entries about christmas, sweden; jul, lucia.]

Eponym Blog Directory

2006-12-12T10:13:00.000+01:00

There's a new blog ranking service out, the Eponym Blog Directory, and I don't know much about it. But they certainly seem to be doing something right, as they rank Salto sobrius #1 for archaeology and #19 for science overall.

Tolkien and Archaeology

2006-12-10T10:30:00.000+01:00

An old idea of mine is popping up independently in the heads of other scholars who aren't just musing about it but actually publishing studies -- on Tolkien and archaeology.

Said I in Swedish in the gaming mag Codex in October of 2001:

Just like everyone in Middle-earth is always ready to deliver a snatch of an old heroic lay, so Tolkien's landscape is full of ancient monuments. The Barrow Downs, Weathertop, Moria, Argonath and Amon Hen, Dunharrow and the Paths of the Dead; the examples are many. They contribute to an illusion that Middle-earth is much larger than the story we happen to be reading, much older; ourselves and the main characters of the narrative we're following are incidental figures and not a central condition for the existence of the world. The painting continues outside the frame, and behind the central figures we can make out a busy background of history.

Says Deborah Sabo of the Arkansas Archaeological Survey (Thanks to Beregond for the heads-up!):

"Tolkien ... imprinted the time-depth of his legendary world on the land, through place-names, ruins and monuments. [A]rcheological places provide the setting of many incidents within the book. ... Taken together, these places form a cultural landscape that is experienced by hobbits, dwarves, elves, men and orcs in distinctive ways."

Dr Dimitra Fimi of Cardiff wrote her PhD thesis on "The Creative Uses of Scholarly Knowledge in the Writings of J.R.R. Tolkien". She will be teaching an on-line course titled "Exploring Tolkien: There and Back Again" starting on 12 February 2007.

"This on-line course will examine Tolkien's awareness of northern European mythologies and languages as well as other aspects of his scholarly background, such as anthropology and archaeology."

I've never gotten round myself to systematically identifying Tolkien's archaeological sources, but I do know there are at least two Swedish ones. Early Iron Age rock carvings of mounted warriors at Tegneby in Bohuslän show up among the goblins' cave art in The Father Christmas Letters. And Laketown in The Hobbit looks a lot like the 12th century AD pile dwelling in Lake Tingstäde on Gotland.

Actually, my studies of archaeology and neighbouring subjects have somewhat diminished my enjoyment of Tolkien. They have made the flaws, joints and white spots in his work apparent like they never were to me as a child. Middle-earth doesn't really work when seen from anthropological and economic viewpoints. And Tolkien's world-building makes heavy use of models and interpretations of real-world history that are no longer accepted by scholars. But still he's one of my great favourites.

Yesterday I sat down with my son and played the Gameboy version of The Two Towers, which is a really silly game. An Aragorn looking a lot like Viggo Mortensen was running around the western foothills of the Misty Mountains, killing orcs and collecting gems. A lot of the orcs were also carrying lembas travel bread, on such a scale that they must have had a captive Elven baker hidden somewhere. Abandoned sacks, crates and treasure chests dotted the landscape, and Viggo-Aragorn had to hit them with his sword for gems to appear. Still, my 8-year-old thinks the game is pretty OK, and unlike me he's a member of the target audience. I can always return to the books.

[More blog entries about archaeology, Tolkien, fantasy, ; arkeologi, Tolkien, fantasy.]

Entry Points

2006-12-09T19:30:00.000+01:00

Extreme Tracking does a really good job of tracking this blog's readers. Among other things, it looks at what search terms you guys use to arrive here, and how often. Here's the top 20 terms after nearly a year's tracking (disregarding uninformative words like "the").

salto
sobrius
Viking
Sweden
Qtek
bikini
Celtic
9100
Stockholm
Swedish
Bible
Martin
caffeine
withdrawal
shout
Suliman
Cassimjee
archaeology
blog
mask

There are two distinct reasons that these words are common entry points to the blog. Some (Viking, Sweden, Stockholm) are recurring themes here and can be said to be typical of the blog. But others have been used only very rarely here (bikini, Bible, caffeine). The reason that they appear on the list is that a huge number of web searches are done for these terms all the time, and so some of that traffic ends up here almost at random.

I don't have any visitor stats for individual entries on the blog. But judging from the list above, the following must be among the most read of all entries so far.

Qtek 9100 handheld computer
Shawls and bikini tops
Celtic god mask
Jim Benton on Christian child abuse manuals (this guest entry combines the words "Bible", "submission" and "spanking", and so draws an interesting crowd of fundie Christians and porn surfers. Or maybe they're the same people. A few disturbing searches actually look like they may be done by people looking for sadistic child pornography. Let's hope they're working for ECPAT.)
Caffeine withdrawal headache
Shout (just because I used a humourous headline, a huge number of Tears for Fears fans have ended up reading about Medieval law codes.)
Suliman Cassimjee

[More blog entries about websearching, searchterms; webbsökning.]

Skeptical Quarterly

2006-12-08T14:47:00.000+01:00

The year's fourth issue of the skeptic quarterly I co-edit, Folkvett, reached subscribers today. The contents (92 pp.) are entirely in Swedish, as follows.

Ledare: Skall vi bara kritisera pseudovetenskap?
Kimmo Eriksson: Matematikmissbruk
Göran Grimvall: Förenkla -- men inte för mycket
Martin Peterson: Den nya vetenskapen i Luleå
Thors Hans Hansson: Ledande parapsykolog om kvantfysik (recension av Entangled Minds av Dean Radin)
Sven Ove Hansson: Test av ett svenskt medium
Birgitta Forsman & Dan Larhammar: Förtydligande om oredlighetsutredningar
Sven Ove Hansson: Politiskt förvriden vetenskap (recension av The Republican War on Science av Chris Mooney)
Olle Häggström: Duger det att stå utanför och se in?
Notiser

It's a really good issue. Too bad I've already read it in copy-editing.

Folkvett, like the entire skeptic movement, does suffer from a bad gender imbalance, though. Female skeptics, please send me manuscripts for the journal!

[More blog entries about skepticism, Sweden; skepsis, skepticism.]

Facial

2006-12-06T23:30:00.000+01:00

I had a Lost in Translation experience today. (No, it did not involve a scantily clad Scarlett Johansson.)

My wife has felt for some time that the skin of my face needed some serious scrubbing to stomp out the blackheads that marred my ample nose. Not really daring to hope, she offered to pay for a facial treatment at a beauty parlour. To her delight, I took a deep breath, set my jaw manfully and accepted her offer.

After lunch today, I took a short walk from the office to a school for beauty care specialists and spa staff in central Stockholm. The place was full of young women wearing prim white nurse-like uniforms and a lot of make-up. I was expecting to sit for an hour in a hair dresser's chair, listening to podcasts, while someone kneaded my nose. To my surprise, I was instead immediately handed a dressing gown and a pair of plastic slippers, and ordered to strip to my undies. "But I'm just having a face thingy", I spluttered. They knew. They explained that the treatment also involved a backrub. So, soon I was sitting there in the waiting area sofa, wearing only my undies, a short dressing gown and a pair of slippers, feeling like Bill Murray.

The beauty care student who would clean up my face was a rubenesque 20-year-old of Turkish extraction. She introduced herself as Selma and led the way into a large well-lit room with several examination tables on which women of various ages were lying swaddled in sheets while having their faces scrubbed and coated in products. It is a funny feature of beauty care lingo that anything you can buy in bottles or tubes and smear on your face is called a "product".

I too ended up on one of the tables after an uncomfortable moment when I had to get rid of my dressing gown before slipping my winter-pale body under the sheet. Then my caretaker gave me a very nice backrub, had me lie on my back, put cotton swabs on my eyelids, shot steam in my face, slathered it in various products, and, yes, kneaded my nose mercilessly. We had a nice conversation about our lives and careers and loved ones, and I was a bit nervous about my hands. For all intents and purposes, I was at a massage parlour, which was not what I had expected. I felt that if I kept my hands under the sheet, the nose-kneading girl might think I was surreptitiously grabbing myself, and if I kept them on top of the sheet, she might think I was going to grab her. But it passed.

Selma said that she loved the course, that only one of her co-students was a guy and that he was queer, that everybody on duty was required to wear make-up, and she told me what "spa" means. She had been taught that it's an acronym: Salus Per Aquam, "healthy by water". This would go back to the old superstition about healing springs and balneotherapy. Checking this up, I learned that it's an erroneous etymology: "spa" originally simply referred to the Belgian town of Spa whose hot springs were known already to the Romans.

The session ended with Selma massaging my face for ages, which seemed a little pointless, strangely intimate and actually kind of hot, and then she massaged my hands and lower arms, which felt absurd. Then, an hour and a half after I lay down, I was told to get up, flashed everyone in the room yet another glimpse of my claim to hunkiness before getting into the gown again, said goodbye to Selma and went to get my clothes back on.

All in all, an interesting and not unpleasant experience. And my nose? It's very clean. And it's pitted with clean, deep, empty little mine shafts, all clearly visible. You didn't think blackheads actually go away just because you remove their contents, did you?

[More blog entries about beautycare, spa, Sweden; skönhetsvård.]

A Reply to the Minx

2006-12-06T22:01:00.000+01:00

Candy Minx picked up on something I wrote about the Antikythera mechanism. Here are a few comments to what she wrote.

"A question arises, if we had manufactured this device, surely there must have been more of them, and why haven't we found others? [...] These mechanisms weren't needed by the masses because we already had timepieces and complex astronomical devices. [...] I see the similarities in world Mythologies and religions and realize...these stories are CLOCKS."

I agree that nobody in the ancient world really needed accurate clocks. But that doesn't explain why the Ancient Greek clockwork devices didn't become more popular -- for two reasons.

The Greek devices used clockwork, but they weren't clocks: they were astronomical simulators cranked by hand.
People in the High Middle Ages didn't need clocks for any practical purpose: they became popular because of an irrational monastic culture where monks had to pray at certain hours every day.

As for the idea that mythological texts could function as a "mechanism for memory and celestial events", I don't believe that at all. How would that work?

"People already knew the movement of the stars and their sense of time was much more profound and integrated in their lives than the universe is in most of our lives. [...] They knew more about the movements of the heavens and it's importance to everyday life than a grad student in astronomy does today."

I don't know why Candy Minx thinks so. The historical and archaeological record rather suggests that detailed astronomical knowledge was cultivated only within the educated castes of certain highly differentiated civilisations, such as those of Mesopotamia or Greece. Nobody else was very interested since the knowledge wasn't of much practical use and education was a rare luxury. The Greek philosophers prided themselves on performing investigations for their own sake: they certainly didn't want to be seen as engineers.

So the basic difference between Candy's view of the past and mine seems to be that while she feels that there was an almost forgotten order and meaning to much of what happened, I believe that human history has largely been a haphazard, bumbling and meaningless process where nobody really understood much of what was going on.

Finally, two small corrections. Latin did not grow out of Sanskrit: both descended from a lost Indo-European root language. The names Christ and Krishna are not cognates: christós means "anointed" in Greek and krishna means "black" in Sanskrit.

[More blog entries about astronomy, history, archaeology; astronomi, historia, arkeologi.]

Cyber Culture Speaking Gig

2006-12-06T20:14:00.000+01:00

Ming the Merciless has a son named Clas. He teaches at the Berghs School of Communication in Stockholm. Last night he called me and offered me a speaking gig. So next week, I'm going to lecture Clas's students on cyber culture. Yay!

Swedish Archaeology Mailing List

2006-12-05T14:21:00.000+01:00

For over seven years, my pal Göran Werthwein has run a mailing list about archaeology in Swedish. More than 350 interested and knowledgeable people are on it. To join, click on the link and follow the instructions.

[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden; arkeologi.]

Hideous Day of Discovery

2006-12-04T22:04:00.000+01:00

This morning I listened to Ernst Hugo Järegård's demoniac reading of Lovecraft's 1923 short story, "The Rats in the Walls". It's full of history, archaeology and racist physical anthropology. And toward the end was a passage that struck me as good to think of to spice up a dull day at a rescue dig.

"I wonder that any man among us lived and kept his sanity through that hideous day of discovery. Not Hoffman nor Huysmans could conceive a scene more wildly incredible, more frenetically repellent, or more Gothically grotesque than the twilit grotto through which we seven staggered; each stumbling on revelation after revelation, and trying to keep for the nonce from thinking of the events which must have taken place there three hundred, or a thousand, or two thousand or ten thousand years ago."

Then, as I was writing the above, my RSS reader told me "Large mass grave found in the Balkans". The site is apparently located near Zvornik in eastern Bosnia and contains the remains of 700 people murdered for reasons no less atavistic than what befell the victims of the insane de la Poer family in Lovecraft's tale. Only this didn't happen three hundred, or a thousand, or two thousand or ten thousand years ago. It happened in 1992.

[More blog entries about archaeology, Lovecraft, genocide, Bosnia; arkeologi, lovecraft, folkmord, Bosnien.]

Bruce Trigger Deceased

2006-12-04T14:13:00.000+01:00

Canadian archaeologist Professor Bruce Trigger, known to European colleagues mainly for his widely read 1989 book A History of Archaeological Thought, passed away on Friday 1 December at the age of 69. (via the Montreal Gazette)

[More blog entries about archaeology; arkeologi.]

Pseudoarchaeology Talk in Stockholm on Thursday

2006-12-03T23:17:00.000+01:00

If you're in Stockholm and understand Swedish and are prepared to pay 50 kronor to hear a talk about the distinction between archaeology and pseudoarchaeology with illustrated examples of both -- then get thee to ABF, Sveavägen 41, on Thursday evening 7 December, 18:30. I'm the one doing the talking and I like Q&A.

[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, skepticism; arkeologi, skepticism.]

Archaeology Offers No Career

2006-12-03T13:14:00.000+01:00

The Grumpy Old Bookman is fond of saying that fiction-writing is an excellent hobby but completely unrealistic, indeed self-destructive, as a professional career. I periodically repeat the same statement for archaeology. Scandinavia is one of the parts of the world where there are the most jobs per capita in archaeology. Still there are tens of unemployed Scandinavian archaeologists for each one that has a job, however short-term and badly paid.

Here's a recent newspaper story that shows what I'm talking about. Johanna Edqvist of Gothenburg has two MA degrees, one in archaeology and one in museology, and a €32 100 study debt. The only steady job she's been able to find is 25% of full time -- at a Kindergarten.

[More blog entries about career, archaeology, Sweden; karriär, arkeologi, Sverige.]

Album Review: Maggi, Pierce & E.J., Silver

2006-12-03T12:54:00.000+01:00

Thanks to smart web radio site Pandora.com, I've discovered an intriguing and incredibly good band: Maggi, Pierce & E.J. Steve Huey at Allmusic sums them up as "hugely eclectic folk-rockers", which is pretty near the mark. The band themselves suggest "Abba meets Zappa", "Fleetwood Mac meets the Pixies", "Ween meets Joni Mitchell", "Bette Midler meets Wilco" and "Sonic Youth meets the Beatles".

The trio is based in Philadelphia and has issued eight self-published albums since 1995. They still don't have a record deal, which, judging from the songs I've heard so far, must be intentional. The release I'm listening to now is their 2005 triple album, Silver, and I don't know where to begin to tell you, Dear Reader, how much it rules.

Maggi, Pierce & E.J. are two men (basso & tenor) and a woman. All of them write songs. In all kinds of styles. And they switch instruments among themselves between songs. And they sing three-part harmony. And much of their lyrics are excellent stand-alone poetry. And they score their own string arrangements. And the three discs of Silver sound like they might be from three different bands! I am, frankly, in awe of their musicianship.

The first disc is titled Morgen, (German for "morning"), and carries six soft folky songs with acoustic guitars, mandolin, piano and the sweetest singing. I'm really taken with the way MP&E harmonise, and particularly by Maggi's reedy soprano on her "Big Falls, WI".

Then you put on the second disc, Mittag (German for "mid-day"), and you're treated to "Kennison", a rousin' & rockin' power pop number about gender-bending. This disc also has the song that turned me on to the band in the first place, "Snowed In With You", which is a really druggy psych song with lots of Hendrixy guitar, but whose lyrics actually speak sweetly about how nice it would be to be snowed-in in a cabin with someone you love. The Nacht (German for "night") disc starts with a bawdy punk rocker with a raucous Maggi yelling about not remembering her bed-fellow's name, and goes on to a metal song about a depressed E.J. staying in bed all day and whacking off!? I haven't listened to all of Silver yet, but I'm sure looking forward to it. Judging from the liner notes, there's jazz and hip-hop there too, and a song with a tuba part.

Even if all I knew about MP&E was the music, I'd be really curious about them. But then there's the image they cultivate and the messages of album covers, liner notes and the web site. Silver has something that looks like a "Parental Advisory" sticker on the cover, but it actually says "Governmental Oppression Despised". Environmental concerns and gender issues keep popping up in their often humorous lyrics. And judging from the materials the band's made available (as a smoke screen?), they seem to live together in a ménage-à-trois household, keeping a dog. Pierce and E.J. look really gay at photo shoots, though there's nothing fey about their music, and Maggi has the heroin-chic looks and emaciated muscularity of a starving model. They're touring all the time, writing songs in Paris, recording in Berlin, posing for silly pics in Glasgow, playing several gigs a week at small venues. In the summer of 2006 they took a two-week walking tour of the 350 km from Philadelphia to Washington D.C., playing spontaneous gigs in the evenings, being covered on video much of the time to make a film, all in a bid for peace.

Maggi, Pierce & E.J. are musical virtuosi. The image I've formed of them is also that of social and political activists: they would fit excellently on a double bill with Roy Zimmerman. Or Fleetwood Mac. Or the Pixies. Or the Beatles. And nobody I know has ever heard of them!

Update same evening: says Maggi, "this review cracked me up! i loved it. as for starving model, you should see me now. i got a big fat belly. see you on the road somewhere....."

[More blog entries about music, review, maggipierceandej, rock, pop; musik, rock, pop, recension, maggipierceandej.]

Antikythera

2006-11-30T21:02:00.000+01:00

The Antikythera mechanism is an Ancient Greek astronomical simulation device. It sank in the early 1st century BC along with the ship it was travelling on near the island that's given the find its name, and was fished out of the Mediterranean a century ago. A paper in today's issue of Nature presents new work with computer-aided X-ray tomography which has allowed a team of scholars to understand better how the thing worked and to decipher more of its many inscriptions. Using a large number of cogged wheels and gears, the mechanism was designed to simulate and predict the movements and interrelationships of the more important heavenly bodies. Most likely, such contraptions were built among the followers of Hipparchus and Posidonius, whose known interests and level of astronomical insight fit well with the mechanism.

The funny thing about the Antikythera mechanism is that it appears to be isolated, popping up more than 1000 years before the documented start of the High Medieval clockwork tradition. This impression may be due to our incomplete knowledge of what Arabic scholars were doing through the Dark Ages -- they certainly relayed a lot of other Ancient Greek work to posterity. But still, when Medieval Western Europe learned to make clockworks, the technology spread like wildfire, so rapidly that it is impossible to tell exactly where it started. Not so with Antikythera. We have a single find and a few brief mentions of similar tech in the literature of the time. Why is this?

I'd like to submit an idea. The reason that the Ancient Greek clockwork devices didn't catch on may have been that they weren't open source. A proprietary technology, guarded jealously among a small philosophical community, and useless to anyone lacking a solid astronomical education -- it would in fact have been highly surprising if it had started a wave of cultural diffusion. The specimen from the Antikythera wreck wouldn't have been travelling alone: it must have belonged to a philosopher bound for Rome, a man who could maintain the device and use it for astronomical demonstrations and predictions. To anyone else, the mechanism would just have been incomprehensible. And it lay in the best interests of its owner that the world at large remained in the dark about such arcana.

[More blog entries about archaeology, history, astronomy, Greece; arkeologi, historia, astronomi, Grekland.]

Leave the Ghetto

2006-11-30T09:46:00.000+01:00

Dear Reader, I believe we can agree that all citizens of a secularised modern state should have the same rights and opportunities, regardless of their ethnic and phenotypical characteristics. ("Phenotypical" is a nice sciency way of saying "related to skin & hair colour, nose shape and other visual characteristics vaguely typical of people from different parts of the world"). Where we may part company is on the question of ethnic minorities: ex-slave populations, lo-tech tribespeople, tightly-knit diaspora communities, recent immigrants -- any group that is perceived as visually and culturally distinct from the majority population of a state. Because I really mean all citizens. Everyone should enjoy all the rights and opportunities, and carry all the responsibilities, of the majority population. If your granddad was really nasty to my granddad for ethnic reasons, then it does not in my opinion mean that you owe me anything extra. The important thing is that you are not nasty to me now.

An Australian correspondent of mine put it as follows.

In Australia [...], the indigenous people get very generous welfare (education, housing, medical, etc) support. In some cases, this is deserved but misdirected; tribal populations in the outback get a massive amount of funding, but [...] can't solve the problems inherent in a basically Stone Age culture trying to co-exist with the 21st century. And on the other hand, we have people who identify themselves as being Aborigines, because one of their 34 great, great, great grandparents were Aboriginal [...], and also getting more generous welfare than a fifth generation Anglo-Saxon/Celtic Australian (or a 2nd generation Swedish-Australian, or a 1st generation African-Australian).

I say, get off the reservation. Leave the ghetto. In Australia, it would probably be better not to give Aborigines (however such a group may be defined) money to stay in the outback. Better to use it to fund free education and public construction projects in the cities and encourage people in the outback to take part of them. That way, most Australian Aborigines would pretty soon move to the cities, become reasonably affluent and lose touch with non-adaptive traditional lifestyles. It'll be hard to discriminate against Aboriginal-looking people once they all have MBA degrees.

Like all anthropologists, I am a cultural relativist. This position most often takes the expression that "modern Western culture is not intrinsically more valuable than traditional ones". But it goes both ways, really. Traditional cultures are not intrinsically more valuable than the modern Western one. Indeed, no culture has any value at all except in relation to Human Rights: they're all constructed anew each morning anyway. It is of no value to a society, nor to ethnic minorities themselves, that they be encouraged to stay on reservations and in ghettos and remain stuck in unemployment and drug abuse.

In my opinion, the only way that ethnic and phenotypical minorities can actually have equal opportunities is if their members assume places inside majority society through education and employment. Reservation life is just a pale shadow of what these cultures were like in the pre-colonial past. I don't see why it would be useful to anyone that some people be kept, and keep themselves, as cultural museum exhibits. Most reservations were selected as such because they were undesirable to majority society: often awkwardly located patches of badlands. The first priority for members of modern ethnic minorities should not be to remain ethnically distinct and preserve their traditions, but to thrive and contribute to whatever culture works now. Adapt and survive.

My perspective on these things is of course coloured by the fact that I belong to the majority population of a state that was recently identified by The Economist as the world's strongest democracy: Sweden. My ideas on ethnic minorities presuppose that society is reasonably democratic, where the rights of all citizens are protected and where the legal system works. This is unfortunately not the case for most people on Earth. I have also been brought up in an individualistic culture where the most important thing is not to be part of one's people but to be free. I have no relationship to any Swedish tribe or nation: I am an individual relating to other individuals and to the state. I realize that this is very far from how most pre-industrial cultures saw things. But the world is no longer pre-industrial. And if we believe that all cultures are equally valuable as long as they respect Human Rights, then there is no reason for people to stay on reservations or in ghettos any more. Because there they have far less chance of enjoying those rights.

[More blog entries about politics, ethnic, minorities, indigenous; politik, minoriteter, ursprungsbefolkningar.]

Lint Sacrifices

2006-11-28T13:10:00.000+01:00

Clothes give off lint that collects in little wads, for instance in pockets and the turn-ups of trousers. But I also find it on my body, coloured according to what I’ve been wearing, and mainly at three places. Lint collects at the nape of my neck, in my navel and at the upper end of my bum crack. There is a simple and evident explanation for this: religious mites.

All larger terrestrial animals act as unwitting hosts to innumerable microscopic mites (Sw. kvalster). Most of them are harmless, subsisting on little flakes of shed skin. Some allergics react badly to their excrement, but that is rare.

My mites are obviously organized into tribes, one of which occupies my abdomen. They have a central cult site where they congregate regularly to perform sacrifices, lugging enormous loads of lint from far areas such as my upper chest, celebrating great religious feasts that culminate in the lint being heaved into the Great Sacred Pit -- my navel. The theology behind this sacrifice is unclear, but I suppose the mites want to placate some Higher Being, probably me. The mites are periodically killed in devastating numbers when I shower, so the great offerings may be intended to stop me from doing just that. But I am a vengeful God.

What of the great lint deposits made at the nape of my neck? They most likely have to do with the awe and fear felt by the mite tribe on my neck for the dark and mysterious woodlands of my head. I have no doubt but that the head mites, a small-bodied and furtive race hardened by anti-dandruff shampoo, make nocturnal raids on the neck mites, who therefore live in a constant state of fear. Their lint offerings under the eaves of the Head Woods must thus be to appease the mysterious forces lurking up there in the dark.

More horrific still must be the threat that inspires the mites of my lower back to sacrifice lint at the upper end of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Poor little ones.

[More blog entries about humour, mites; humor, kvalster.]

Another Great Dane

2006-11-28T10:49:00.000+01:00

As noted here before, I'm a big fan of Danish archaeology. They have cool material, good scholars, a solid scientific tradition and hardly any tiresome wannabe philosophers nibbling away at their archaeological university funding.

Esben Schlosser Mauritsen is one of the great Danes, and here is his web site. Esben is into archaeology as extreme sports: aerial photography and underwater excavations are his specialities. Check out his project gallery!

[More blog entries about archaeology, Denmark; arkeologi, Danmark.]

Tidy School Fire Site

2006-11-26T14:56:00.000+01:00

27 September.

Took a walk listening to Escape Pod while my Afghani neighbour, the international used-cars dealer and project facilitator, looked after our Doppelganger daughters. I went up to the old school to see what the site of the fire is like two months later. The place is pretty tidy.

26 November.

[More blog entries about fire, arson; eldsvåda, Fisksätra.]

Yixing Tea Cups

2006-11-26T09:42:00.000+01:00

My attempts to buy nice big tea cups in Hangzhou and Hanoi came to naught for two reasons.

Traditional Far Eastern tea cups are the size of egg cups.
Modern Far Eastern household goods are designed to a taste that screams CHEAP AND TACKY to the Western eye. (Yes, I know it's all relative and historically contingent.)

But still we did come home with good cups. My father-in-law took them from work and gave them to us. Apparently he's got a stash of them at the office.

This zisha stoneware is really nice, unglazed, a matte dark chocolate, the vessel shape severe and elegant. The cups are made in Yixing in Jiangsu. I gather the clay is ancient, rich in iron, quarried from beneath formations of sedimentary rock.

Each cup carries an inscription. I fancied it a piece of poetry, perhaps something about cranes and harpistry and wind in the bamboo grove. I generally don't bother much about Chinese script: it's such a huge unknown to me that nibbling at the subject seems futile. But this was inscribed pottery, awakening my archaeological instincts. My wife read it for me.

Heng sheng hua gong chang qing shi zhou nien
Ji shu bu

Literally,
"Eternity rising transformation work factory celebration ten cycle year
Artisanship artisanship department".

That is,
"The Eternally Rising Chemical Factory, Tenth Anniversary
Technical Department".

So much for the poetry. Our beautiful new cups are in fact promotional items, high-end gifts for the employees of my father-in-law's dye factory on its tenth anniversary. But who will ever know? The inscription looks great regardless of its meaning.

[More blog entries about pottery, China; keramik, Kina.]

Flu Shot

2006-11-24T11:04:00.000+01:00

I just had my annual flu shot. The district nurse is always surprised that someone young and healthy like me would want one. The vaccine is mainly intended to keep old people from dying of flu complications. But I feel that if a €15 shot can significantly improve my chances of avoiding a week of flu later this winter, when I would feel like hell and be unable to work, then I would be stupid not to take it.

I got a funny comment from the nurse this time. She said the vaccine supply is poor this year, so strictly speaking they should save the stuff for the old people. "But", she said, "since you've been taking these shots every year and believe in them, we find it hard to say no to you". Believe in them?! I bloody well hope they're giving me something that works regardless of my beliefs!

[More blog entries about health, flu; influensa.]

Gruppo F

2006-11-24T05:28:00.000+01:00

A Parking Place by Jeanette Hägglund.

My pal Markus Andersson is a member of the photographers' group Gruppo F. They started a busy group blog about photography two months ago with lots to read and look at: new work by the seventeen members, old work by greats of the medium, a lot of discussion, all in English. Solid stuff!

[More blog entries about photography, Sweden; fotografi.]

Namesakes

2006-11-23T19:35:00.000+01:00

Dear Reader, let me introduce you to Martin Rundkvist.

Martin has trained as a seaman and worked as a chef. The 26-year-old is now a teacher at the Nakkebølle boarding school for troubled teens on southern Funen in Denmark. I haven't had the pleasure of meeting him.

Danish Martin is the only person I'm aware of who spells his name just like mine. There are at least five more Martin Rund**ists in Sweden, living in Borensberg, Tibro, Norrköping, Staffanstorp and Hjo. But they spell their surnames Rundquist, Rundqvist and Rundqwist. There used to be one in the Stockholm area too, but he changed his surname -- gasping with relief, one imagines.

Funny how unimportant a name is as long as it blends in with the surrounding flora. Martin Rundkvist, Mattias Sundkvist, Markus Lindkvist, whatever. Danish Martin's name, though, must look slightly odd to his compatriots, a bit like if I were named Ole Krag Nielsen.

Laggin' Again

2006-11-22T03:33:00.000+01:00

Back home in fine shape though with a slight circadian dysfunction. In Hangzhou -- and in my head -- it's approaching lunch time. Here it's 03:30 in the morning. Me and my daughter are sharing the last seaweed crackers from the plane. Door to door, it took us a bit less than 18 hours to get here. Marco Polo's shade scoffs at the ease of our travels.

I've been hearing about the carbon dioxide emissions linked to air travel. Apparently, once we really start to take CO2 emissions seriously, then casual air travel will simply no longer be possible. Which would of course kill the entire global tourism sector and take a number of Third World economies with it. Kind of a fascinating perspective to ascetic me. Once more would a Slow Boat to China be the way to go...

[More blog entries about travel; resor.]

Behind the Great Firewall

2006-11-20T09:42:00.000+01:00

A week each in Hangzhou, China and Hanoi, Vietnam has taught me a bit about Far Eastern internet censorship and how to get around it. From Hangzhou, I have been entirely unable to access

Wikipedia.org
Technorati.com
Blogger.com's control panel and comment forums

This has been a major hassle for me as those sites are otherwise constantly revisited stations on my daily internet wanderings. To post entries to my blog from China, I've had to e-mail them, which has led to formatting problems and precluded pictures. In order to read blogs on Blogger.com, I have had to use

The more techno-literate may have use for Proxy4free.com as well.

A quick sampling turned up other blocked sites:

In Hanoi I didn't have this kind of problem at all. Despite the Vietnamese government being similar to the Chinese one (non-elected, anti-free-speech, nominally Communist, practically Capitalist), I could access the sites I wanted from our hosts' home computer. According to our hostess, Vietnamese internet censorship occurs somewhat haphazardly at the ISP level, which means that some bandwidth providers will let you do whatever you want.

This squares well with our impression that Hanoi, though a much grubbier and less affluent city, is far more aware of the West than skyscraper-studded Hangzhou, where non-salespeople in the street sometimes excitedly yell "Look at the foreigner! HELLO!" when they see me. It very likely has to do with Vietnamese history: a century of French colonial rule, friendly exchange with Soviet Russia, the American occupation, foreign aid in recent decades.

But there may be a scarier explanation. The broadband connection we used in Hanoi is registered to a person working as a consultant for the Swedish foreign aid agency, SIDA. It's entirely possible that this connection has had the censorship machinery selectively turned off. And replaced with a wiretap.

[More blog entries about internet, censorship, China, Vietnam; internet, censur, Kina, Vietnam.]

Chinese Superstition

2006-11-19T14:18:00.000+01:00

China has a millennia-old tradition of superstition (astrology, numerology, fengshui geomancy, qigong practicioners boasting supernatural gifts) and non-evidence-based medicine. Within a tradition of such medicine, there is a mechanism that weeds out treatments with any strong effect: damaging ones disappear because they lead to lawsuits against druggists and physicians; significantly beneficial ones disappear because they undergo clinical testing and become co-opted by scientific medicine. Chinese medical researchers, meanwhile, are doing well in their international scientific field and not paying much attention to the roots, fungi and snake blood of the trad quacks.

Traditional drugstores are still very much a part of Chinese culture, often referring in their architecture and packaging to a curious blend of the aeons-old tried-and-true and the cutting-edge scientific. I visited one in Hangzhou the other day that looked like a 19th century merchant's residence. The message of Chinese alternative medicine to customers is that it is venerable, brand new, semi-magical, clinical, natural and high-tech. In fact, it won't hurt you and it won't heal you.

Numerology in its simplest form (based on the similarities of words) states that eight is good and four is bad. Everybody wants a phone number with 88 in it, and nobody is allowed to begin at a new job on the 4th, 14th or 24th -- neither in the Gregorian nor the Chinese Farmer's calendar. At least they don't have a problem with 13.

The old religions are once again encouraged in China, and many temple compounds currently look like construction sites thanks to the munificence of noveaux-riches entrepreneurs freed from the shackles of state socialism. Effigies of Mao Zedong receive considerable religious attention along with Amithaba, Guanyin, Laozi, Confucius and the others. Chinese Buddhism is such a mess -- simple stupid idolatry, the original intellectual content irrecognisable.

One internationally known new religious movement, Falun gong, is not liked at all by the authorities. FG's version of things is that they are a peaceful meditative movement being persecuted by a nasty totalitarian regime. In my view it's actually a case of a nasty manipulative millennarian cult being persecuted by a nasty totalitarian regime. FG's leader is one of the aforementioned qigong practicioners boasting supernatural gifts.

The latest piece of Chinese superstition I've come across is another combination of the rootsy and the pseudo-scientific. Stores offer little wooden cages neatly packed with short charred-black bamboo sticks. They're supposed to work as air-fresheners -- because of active carbon! If you ground several hundred sticks really finely, packed a filter with the powder and put it into an industrial-strength fan, then I guess it would actually work to free the air in a room of aerosols. But the little cages are at least an intriguing conversation piece until the next supernatural fad appears.

[More blog entries about skepticism, superstition, China; skepticism, vidskepelse, Kina.]

Book Review: Hunter, Gay Mystery Novels

2006-11-17T12:31:00.001+01:00

Fred Hunter

Ransom For Our Sins (1996; the 3rd Jeremy Ransom/Emily Charters mystery)
Government Gay (1998; the 1st Alex Jennings mystery)
National Nancies (2001; the 4th Alex Jennings mystery)

Reviewed by Jim Benton

There is nothing new about gay or lesbian detective story writers. They've been around since the very beginning of American mystery stories. To mention a few names, Patricia Cornwell, Cornell Wollrich/William Irish, and Stanton Forbes are all both worth knowing and gay. In fact, "S.S. VanDine" (Willard Huntington Wright) who was arguably the first important American detective story writer since Poe, and the first to establish the American Mystery Story as a respectable genre, was also, reportedly, a 'classic' intellectual/aesthete queen type. Certainly his detective, Philo Vance, was (despite a mention of a passing and not really believable hetero romance in a couple of the later books).

But the 'gay detective story' written, usually, by gay men with a main character who is openly and unashamedly gay (whether he is an amateur investigator, a policeman, or a professional investigator) is much newer. (The lesbian detective story deserves to be discussed separately. Most of the gay detective books have been published by mainstream publishers and because of this have had a certain professionalism to them. Lesbian counterparts have, in the past, more frequently been published by specialty publishers, sometimes semi-self published. Hopefully I will discuss this topic in a future $.99 post.)

The field began with Joseph Hansen's Dave Brandstetter books. There has been some criticism of them as being a little too earnest and humorless, but the idea of a someone being a semi-tough Private Eye (technically an insurance investigator) and a gay man with a settled life was a major breakthrough. The early books had gay-related themes, but the later ones were more varied. They had their flaws, but the twelve books in the Brandstetter series (and Hansen's few non-series works) are still worth looking for.

Hansen's work broke the ice, and mainstream publishers found a substantial market for gay mystery stories. While some writers started out in specialty houses for the gay market, most of the major writers in the sub-field were quickly picked up by the mass market. (In an interesting cross-over, St. Martin's produced a line of "Stonewall Inn Mysteries" in large-sized paperback that included originals and reprints of some of the better writers in the field.)

There are over a dozen main series available, ranging the genre from police procedurals to at least one 'hard-boiled private eye' (Richard Stevenson's Donald Strachey, who has appeared in seven novels -- unfortunately, of the three I've read, only the second, On the Other Hand, Death is worth looking for.) Most of the series tend to feature amateur detectives, ranging from the campy hairdresser of Grant Michaels' Stan Kraychick novels to the serious and well-drawn Chicano lawyer of Michael Nava's Henry Rios books.

Interestingly enough, the books' settings are scattered throughout America, but, except for the Provincetown-located Valentine and Lovelace books by Nathan Aldyne (enjoyable but very lightweight) none of them are located in what most people would think of as gay settings. Rios opens his career in San Francisco but moves to Los Angeles, and the others are set in places such as Albany (the Stevenson books), Minneapolis (R.D. Zimmerman's Todd Mills books), Boston (the Kraychick books, I believe -- two of them are on my to read pile) and no less than four series in Chicago, two each by Mark Richard Zubro (my own favorites of those I have read -- I have yet to read Nava) and the two by Fred Hunter that -- at last -- I am getting around to reviewing: the Jeffrey Ransom series of police procedurals and the wildly funny Alex Jennings mystery/espionage series.

There have been at least nine books featuring Jeffrey Ransom and his 'adopted grandmother', Emily Charters. They are police procedurals, but much more in the English mode, with the policeman and his assistant (in this case Gerald White) more or less on their own in solving the case. Emily Charters, who, from description, is more of a presence in the other books, is limited to minor appearances and suggestions in this book because she is recovering from bypass surgery.

Ransom For Our Sins has whetted my appetite for the other books in the series, but, in all honestly, I have to call it a 'good bad book'. Hunter's strengths here are in the writing, descriptions, and particularly the characters. All of them come alive, and it is particularly gratifying to see characters that could easily be flat clichés -- the leader and other members of a religious 'community' ("we prefer to call it that, not a church") -- become fully three-dimensional. Ransom himself is an engaging eccentric. Surprisingly, while there are repeated statements and reactions that show he is almost certainly gay, and open to and accepted as such by his partner, it is never explicitly stated. Certainly he's never shown with sexual reactions or desires, and he seems to spend most evenings at his hobby of reading Dickens in the bathtub. (He had accompanied this with cigars, but he is attempting to give them up as the book begins.)

I want to spend more time with Jeffrey Ransom, but I hope that Hunter has learned to avoid the flaws that seriously affect this book. One is that because his plot requires a slow build and investigation, one which would have been ruined by the presence of the media, he simply writes any public notice of the crimes out of the book, a serious blow to the 'suspension of disbelief.' It is conceivable that some murders would get overlooked -- though most of them do get some notice in the news in most cities -- but when the first body is shown to have been 'crucified' -- in fact, not hung on a cross, but with the hands and feet pierced with nails -- and when another body is discovered in the same condition, it is simply inconceivable that the press would not have made it a major story. This is one flaw, and the second is that when the murderer is, in fact, revealed, no satisfactory reason is given for the crucifixions. Again, a 'good bad book' but if you find it, one worth picking up.

The Alex Jennings books -- there have been at least five so far -- are as different from the Ransoms as two series can be from the same writer, and these can be recommended with no qualms except for the titles. These are 'gay' books in both meanings of the term. The lead character and narrator is openly gay, and they are simply a lot of joyous fun. They come closer to espionage fiction involving a mystery than straight detective stories, and the first book's title is a homage to the movie Government Girl, -- no I don't know it, but the other movie that is echoed, North by Northwest, everyone knows.

Alex Jennings is a graphic designer who lives with his husband, Peter Livesay ("He calls me that, too.") in Alex's very British, very rich, mother's Chicago townhouse. ("Peter and I are so happily married we even disgust ourselves." It's true, and one of the nicer touches. Again, Hunter's characterizations are excellent, with both Alex and mother Jean being two of the more delightful people I've come across in the pages of mysteries.)

Government Gay starts with Alex wandering into a gay bar simply to kill time while his mother attends a meeting, having a brief conversation with a character he meets there, giving him a cigarette, going into the mens' room, and immediately being set upon by two hulking characters (the 'clay people' as Alex calls them) asking him 'where is it, we saw him talking to you'. Alex tries to explain he doesn't know what they are talking about, and gets whacked rather substantially until the goons are interrupted. And off we go...

The rest is a wild, funny, somewhat deadly series of adventures and misadventures involving the CIA, the 'clay people', various false identities and mysterious meetings, a couple of corpses, all told in a light, campy style. (A couple of critics have complained about this, but I find it a gay twist on the sort of lightness that was so common in American "Silver Age" authors from George Bagby through Stuart Palmer to Phoebe Atwood Taylor. Too many present-day mysteries are totally humorless, or else nearer to classic screwball comedies. This is simply light and funny and much appreciated.) The plot is good, solid, and somewhat surprising, and the ending is worthy of the Hitchcockian model, with Alex clinging to a scaffold on the top of the Sears Tower.

But the fourth book in the series, National Nancies, is, despite the title, by far the best of the books reviewed here. A true mystery, though with a minor bit of CIA involvement -- one result of the first book is that Alex is frequently requested to lend his services to that agency -- and a solid political novel, made even more pointed by some of the events of the last election. Alex, though usually non-political, has been dragged into volunteering for a liberal, gay-friendly Senatorial candidate involved in an easy primary before a difficult general election against a bigoted, homophobic Republican. The campaign has been receiving vitriolic phone calls and almost daily bomb threats.

Only one morning, at 5:00, the threats turn real as a bomb destroys the campaign headquarters, in the process killing the universally disliked and somewhat fanatical lesbian office manager. Was it a fanatic, a 'mole' in the office, or was the bomb meant to do what it did and kill the victim? Off the spouses and mom go, sleuthing and 'playing spy' again, though with the slight distraction of a new romance that mother Jean is apparently getting involved in -- and Alex's reaction to this is a priceless extra to a magnificent book.

The plot is solid, the scenes are excellent, the solution is a good one: all in all, a book that is enjoyable by anyone, regardless of orientation (and if I haven't mentioned my own, I am a predominantly straight bisexual). And there are moments of pure brilliance, from an opening scene where the candidate shows the proper response to rumors that he is gay (if only I had read this a week before instead of two days after the election, I might have e-mailed the passage to a number of campaigns) to an ending two scenes -- after the solution -- that are both totally unexpected and absolutely perfectly done.

Definitely, if you happen upon National Nancies, grab a copy -- even if you have to put it in a brown paper wrapper.

Water Puppets

2006-11-17T11:41:00.000+01:00

Writing this back in Hangzhou on Friday evening after a day's air travel, I still have a vivid memory of last night's entertainment. It was truly unusual.

South-east Asia has a solid puppetry tradition with the Indonesian shadow puppets probably being the most well-known. To me, the Vietnamese water puppets were entirely new. This tradition is rooted in the rice-paddy landscape of the Red River delta where Hanoi and Haiphong are located. Performances would once be given during harvest feasting, celebrating the area's agriculture and fishing, its fauna and folkways. The players crouch in the dark behind a bamboo screen dividing a pool of water, extending garishly painted puppets on long poles under the screen into the well-lit part of the pool overlooked by the audience. Many puppets have movable parts manoeuvred with strings inside the poles.

We caught a performance at the Water Puppet Theatre overlooking Lake Returned Sword, where the same 45-minute show is given five times a day. The audience was almost entirely European in appearance. Stage right, an excellent musical octet in traditional garb played energetic classical Sino-Vietnamese music and acted as chorus. I love live music and was particularly impressed by the flutist and the soprano, one a jovial man of middle age, the other a young woman who looked like she was dying of boredom but who nevertheless sang like a goddess. Most of the speaking parts were performed by the eight invisible puppeteers behind the green screen, topped by a traditional Chinese-style temple.

There didn't seem to be any story to the evening's performance, which was probably wise given the audience's general lack of language comprehension. We were treated to a series of vignettes and skits, many humorous, some mainly demonstrations of the puppeteers' skill and coordination set to music. Dragons frolicked and fought, a swamp cat stole a farmer's duck and the Golden Turtle took the divine sword from the hand of Le Loi. Water sprayed and cascaded, we had fireworks, and the puppets were many and elaborate. Great show, even for a foreigner who knows neither the cultural background nor the language.

[More blog entries about puppetry, Vietnam; dockteater, Vietnam.]

Vietnamese Millennia

2006-11-15T10:59:00.000+01:00

Yesterday my wife and kids let me loose for a few hours to go stare at old stuff. Being a responsible husband and father I really tried to find a four-wheel taxi or bus to improve my chances of survival for the trip. But I ended up on what the locals call a "Honda embrace", a moped taxi, weaving crazily through the throng on my way to the Historical museum. Yet I live.

Hanoi's historical museum is a proud saffron architectural hybrid of the early 20th century, unashamedly colonial and in excellent repair. The displays cover palaeontology, archaeology and recent craftsmanship, from Homo Erectus teeth to mementoes of colonial period rebels. The exhibition philosophy is old-school apart from a few cave-dweller dioramas, with entire site inventories displayed down to the last cutmarked rhino vertebra. Good for me, boring for the casual visitor. But the cases are enlivened by panoramas of landscapes and excavations plus a lot of photographed excavation sections. The latest additions to the cases represent excavations only a few years ago.

The Neolithic pottery is very nice, but things really pick up with the Bronze Age which is absurdly rich, this being south-east Asia. 170 bronzes in one log-coffin burial, you get the idea. A dozen Dong son culture drums offer wonderfully alien stylised imagery of birds, bird-men and warlike boat crews, the latter actually much like coeval rock carvings in southern Sweden. (Look for the miniature bonking taking place on the lid of a particularly huge bronze urn!) Then comes the Han dynasty Chinese cultural juggernaut and transforms everything. A selection of beautiful Champa sculpture is also offered, the melon-bosomed Hindu dancing girls you always see in Indian art portrayed here with unmistakeable Vietnamese faces and big grins.

The museum clearly caters primarily to the locals, as the many texts and maps are mostly in Vietnamese. Shorter but informative labels in English and French also abound. Confusingly, there is a consistent 2000 year discrepancy between the dates given in English and French respectively. As far as I can tell, correct French dates avant notre ère (BC) have been translated into English by someone who believes that notre ère means "today". A francophone visitor with some grasp of European chronology thus realises correctly that Northern Europe was pretty much a cultural backwater during Prehistory, while an Anglo gets the opposite impression.

[More blog entries about archaeology, Vietnam; arkeologi, Vietnam.]

Old Hanoi

2006-11-14T04:28:00.000+01:00

At the heart of modern Hanoi is a small lake named Hoan Kiem, "Returned Sword". This moniker goes back to a legend about the 15th century national hero Le Loi who led a successful rebellion against the Chinese. Fishing in the lake outside the town walls, young Le Loi caught a golden sword in his net. Very Arthurian. This weapon he wielded in battle for many years before returning one day as a king to thank the lake's spirit with an offering. The gods at this point apparently felt that he needed no more assistance, and so the king, eyes agog, saw the sword fly from its scabbard out over the lake and into the mouth of a golden turtle surfacing for the occasion. Mission accomplished, sword returned.

There is actually a dwindling stock of massive turtles in the green water. One was caught in 1968 and is on display in a small 19th century temple on an islet, just off the site of an obelisk with a trippy inscription in three Chinese characters: "Write Turquoise Sky", that is, take that bamboo brush and scribble away at the firmament. "And so I throw the windows wide and call to you across the sky".

Hanoi's Old Quarter is just north of the lake, a moped-infested maze of narrow alleys lined by two- and three-story houses with storefronts at ground level. The typical building is called a Tube House, as it is very narrow and very long, wall to wall with its neighbours. Before electrical lighting, such a structure would have several open-air courts along its length to admit light and air. After lunch today we visited a renovated late-19th century example and got a feel for what they were like.

Like a Medieval European city, the Old Quarter was walled and its streets specialised by trade: Butcher Street, Baker Street etc. And as with most of its European equivalents, the Old Quarter's walls have been torn down and the streets' specialities mostly survive only as names. No longer does anyone expect to buy fish in York's Fishergate or cups and pots in its Coppergate ("gate" here being a Scandinavian loan word, cf. Sw. gata). But although many of the old specialities are gone, specialisation itself is still very much apparent in Hanoi: Oil Street merchants deal almost exclusively in shoes, Drum Skin Street has bags and upholstered furniture, Sugar Street has clothing. This can be frustrating for the tourist who wants a snack and can find nothing but ladies' fashion.

I like the food streets, just like I love to prowl covered markets in Europe. In addition to a lot of familiar stuff, Hanoi's small-time butchers and fishmongers offer some pretty wild goods. We saw tiny wiggly leeches sold by the cupful, maggots, live poultry, a little runaway crab making its last stand in the dirty street, but funnily no identifiable cuts of dog.

Dog is apparently holiday food, associated with certain phases of the moon, believed to cleanse your system and increase erectile stamina. I gather that erection problems are kind of an international ethnic trauma among Far Eastern men, with sad consequences for the tigers, rhinoceri and snakes that get made into, well, snake oil. Looking at the region's population growth figures, I can't really see why these guys worry. It's not like they have anything left to prove.

[More blog entries about Vietnam; Vietnam.]

Mopeds and Ancestor Worship in Hanoi

2006-11-12T10:24:00.000+01:00

Arbre de Têt dans le trafic. Par Petit Dragon.

The streets of Hanoi aren't dimensioned for cars, and the public transportation system isn't dimensioned for the Vietnamese capital's current two-million population. So everyone drives a moped -- kamikaze style.

They're everywhere, they go fast, they sound like giant mutant wasps (hence the Italian Vespa) and there are rarely less than two people on each vehicle. Oh, and they beep. Our host, charming Swiss stay-at-home dad Patrick, took me for a ride this morning on his own steed, so I've been there and lived. (He's an ace photographer, check out his Vietnamese work.) We checked out the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum (the old man wanted to be cremated and popped into the earth on a hillside where people could go to plant trees, but such is of course not the fate of successful revolutionaries), one of the world's few surviving colossal Lenin statues, the elegant colonial architecture of the French quarter, the remains of a B52 bomber shot down about the year I was born and now proudly displayed, the works.

Our hostess is the enchanting Swedish blogger Zornkvinnan (alas, she currently doesn't often grace the intartubes with her writings) who has made friends with my wife. The two ladies met for the first time last night at the airport and seem to be getting along really well. We all had a typical Hanoi lunch at a rootsy sidewalk eatery where the mopeds whizzed past at arm's length. Barbecued minced-pork patties, noodles, fresh liquorish-tasting greens, all dunked in hot broth seasoned with chili, garlic and fish sauce. Heavenly! Then we walked through the drizzle from awning to awning in the Old Quarter's most cramped market alleys, looking at food and napping saleswomen, buying a miniature tea set for my daughter. It's intended for the ancestor cult at the ubiquitous house shrine, though I believe its new owner may be more likely to use it for entertaining her dolls. Let's hope that this entices a few friendly ex-mopedist's spirits to take up residence in our playroom, ensuring health and prosperity.

[More blog entries about Vietnam; Vietnam.]

Leifeng Pagoda

2006-11-11T07:07:00.000+01:00

The last king of Wuyue during the Ten Kingdoms imperial interregnum was a devout Buddhist. One of his many religious construction projects was a towering pagoda on Leifeng, "Thunder Top", built to house a lock of Sakyamuni's hair. Completed in the AD 970s, the structure on the southern shore of the West Lake was refurbished and rebuilt repeatedly through the centuries until Japanese pirates torched it in the 18th century and it was abandoned. The tower's brick core still stood as a prominent landmark, sprouting small trees, a favourite haunt of tourists and lovers of romantic ruins, until it collapsed in the 1920s. Treasure hunters were most likely to blame for that final indignity.

The site still retained its fame, being associated with the story of Lady White Snake, and even Mao made an official visit to the ruin mound of the pious old king. Times changed, and in 1999 the burghers of Hangzhou decided to rebuild the pagoda as part of their investments in West Lake tourism. Archaeologists were called in to excavate, and the structure's various incarnations were identified all the way back to the 10th century crypt where the lock of hair had been housed. A considerable amount of fine votive metalwork was also unearthed, some of it having been antique already when deposited, indicating that the looters had good reason to target this particular site.

Until recently, Chinese reconstructions of ancient buildings have been pretty brutal, often obliterating the remains of the original structures. The philosophy seems to have been "we want to show the tourists something we can be proud of, not just crappy old ruins". The tourist-friendly parts of the Great Wall, where not a single original stone can be seen, are a case in point. But recently, a more respectful attitude has been adopted. In 2002 a magnificent new octagonal five-story pagoda was inaugurated on Thunder Top, yet again dominating the West Lake's southern skyline. But the new structure stands on steel stilts with the remains of its predecessors preserved and displayed in situ in the basement.

Visitors toss droves of coins onto the old brick walls. I wonder if many of them do so out of piety. Buddhist cult with incense-burning and praying is encouraged outside a building at the foot of the hill housing a silver reliquary found by the archaeologists. It's the first time I've seen an archaeological find becoming the object of religious worship, as opposed to religious relics housed above ground attracting the interest of archaeologists.

The new pagoda looks great from afar. Close-up, it's pretty tacky like all modern Chinese re-imaginations of the past, unabashedly made of modern materials, its faux-copper columns painted with metallic plastic. It's basically a fancy lookout tower for tourists with display cases full of neo-classical Chinese artwork. But each age has of course rebuilt the thing for its own purposes and with the materials available. One day the 2002 version of Leifeng pagoda will also be excavated by curious posterity.

Green Tea at Longjing

2006-11-10T06:00:00.000+01:00

Old Hangzhou sits on the eastern shore of much-bepoemed West Lake and has recently exploded in a blast of skyscrapers and factories to the north, east and south. But west and south of the lake are still wooded hills, fertile parts of whose slopes are terraced and planted with tea. Yesterday we took a bus to Longjing, the village of Dragon's Well, which sits at the head of a valley surrounded by teabearing mountains. There are excellent hiking trails in the area, and we took the kids up along one of them to the top of Qipanshan, Chessboard Mountain. Actually, we didn't have to take them there, they happily ran up much of the path among bamboo and banana plants. None of the trees were more than a few decades old, so the area must pretty much have been denuded in recent times. There's a pottery industry near where we're staying with Medieval traditions at least since the South Song, so I imagine that logging pressure for the kilns must have been intense. (They used to make ceremonial porcelain for the Imperial court. Now they make toilets. Guess what ordinary people have more use for.)

After our escalade, 750 horizontal meters either way as the crow flies, we had lunch under a parasol, listening to the squall of the fish tank and the maniacal keening of amorous insects in the trees. This being Longjing, which is a household name for tea in the Chinese-speaking world, we of course had some local green. And boy, did we get tea. There was hardly any room for water in my glass, its contents looking more like a salad than a beverage. I'm not much into green tea, it's just bitter-nutty water to me. But it was kind of nice to recognise the very same leaf buds that we had sampled off of blooming bushes on terraces up on the mountain. The food was nice: spinach with tofu, prawn and cured ham: red soy pork side with blubber on; and a thick-stemmed mustard-like plant chopped and fried with paprika and white slivers of, if I understood correctly, pig windpipe.

We spent the afternoon questing for pirated (or at least cheap) Gameboy games in the city, learning that for DS games it is no longer profitable to pirate them onto physical cartridges as the kids tend to mod their DS consoles and download games from the net. Just a more convenient medium, cutting out the middle man.

Jet Lagged Small Hours

2006-11-09T13:21:00.000+01:00

Great to be reunited with wife & daughter! And the kids were really happy to see each other too. We left Hangzhou airport at three p.m. and went home to my in-laws, where I napped and then had dinner. Fried ribbon fish, soy beans in the pod boiled with salt, spinach with garlic, taro in pork broth, egg plant with soy sauce, rice. Did jigsaw puzzles with my daughter, put the kids to bed, retired for some quality time with my lovely wife at half past eight and soon fell asleep -- only to wake at little past three in the morning. So here I am, drinking tea, having a rou baozi (a wheat bun filled with ground pork) and a moon cake, reading Addison's vignettes about Roger de Coverley.

Outside there's a tremendous racket from trucks on the road and trains passing by, hooting like an orchestral brass section at each other. And on the other side of tracks are the homes of the poor at the feet of the wooded hills south of the West Lake. I hiked up there a few years back, discovering overgrown necropoli and a number of Buddhist shrines.
(Thursday 9 November 04:40).

Changing Planes

2006-11-09T10:45:00.000+01:00

I'm typing these words at Beijing International Airport, domestic gate 27. It's near lunch time here, four in the morning in my head. Not too badly zonked yet by sleep deprivation: the sunshine is bright and I accidentally bought a soda can of sweetened ice coffee with milk, branded Pokka. Couldn't read anything on the can, wanted to try some local stuff. The can was massive, almost twice the metal weight of a Western one.

Beijing smells of coal smoke and is wrapped in a faint ochre haze. Approaching for landing, we flew over something that looked a lot like a nuclear power plant with the characteristic truncated-cone cooling towers, surrounded by industrial sprawl and endless tenement housing blocks. And yet, as always in this country, there's small-scale agriculture on every spare scrap of land all the way up to the airport fence. The barbed wire festoons along its top are most likely there to keep guerilla subsistence farmers from planting qing cai along the runways. Urban zoning seems absent or at least negotiable.

My El Cheapo cell phone operator (dJuice) doesn't seem to have a roaming agreement with the locals, and not only is the wifi here blocked by a pay screen -- it's entirely in Chinese. So I can't get this on-line right away. Signing off at Wednesday lunch, 11:35 (GMT+8).

New Archaeology Doctorates

2006-11-07T13:36:00.000+01:00

Antiquity is preparing to launch a web site section on new doctorates in archaeology and allied disciplines. Anyone who graduated with a PhD or equivalent in 2006 would be eligible. All you recent archaeodocs out there, send your info to editor@antiquity.ac.uk on the following format:

Name, surname first: Strudelfunker, Attila
University: Neckarsulm
Date awarded: 2006-04-01
Title: The Late Bronze Age pottery of the Isle of Dogs
Abstract: 250 words max.

[More blog entries about archaeology; arkeologi.]

Correspondent for Antiquity

2006-11-07T13:21:00.000+01:00

With great pleasure, I've agreed to act as a correspondent for the excellent British world archaeology journal Antiquity. Judging from where my co-correspondents are based, it looks like I'm alone north of the Roman limes and west of Russia. So, Dear Reader, send me interesting bits of information and I'll pass them on to the editoral offices of Antiquity in York!

[More blog entries about archaeology; arkeologi.]

Self-Satisfied Crowing

2006-11-07T07:57:00.000+01:00

Technorati recently estimated that there are 57+ million blogs on the net. About 31 million of them have been updated within the past three months. Thus Salto sobrius, currently being ranked about 17000 on Technorati, is among the top 0.06% of active blogs worldwide. In other words, 99.94% of all active blogs are less linked-to (i.e. "relevant") than this baby. How about that!

Book Review: Simak, Visitors

2006-11-06T21:12:00.000+01:00

The Visitors
Clifford D. Simak 1980
Original magazine appearance in Analog 1979 in somewhat different form.
Availability: not currently in print, but Amazon has a number of pbs and hbs for sale as low as $.01 -- of course, shipping and handling adds another $3. Alibris has no copy under $2.95 plus s&h.

Reviewed by Jim Benton

Clifford D. Simak wrote science fiction for over fifty years, from 1931 up until his death in 1988, turning out about 30 novels and many short stories. Despite his two Hugos and one International Fantasy Award, I consider most of his work rather minor -- City, a novelization of several short stories, might be an exception, but it has been many years since I have read it. (I have to say that the readers who have voted in Locus polls would differ with me, since Simak finished in the top 30 for best SF author of all time in several of their polls.)

Whatever, certainly The Visitors is one of Simak's weakest works, perhaps his worst and most disappointing. "Disappointing" mostly because it has one major strength. The "visitors" of the title are that rarity, a new idea in aliens, and one worthy of Stanley G. Weinbaum for true alienness. They are building-sized black boxes, most likely creatures rather than ships, that suddenly appear first in orbit around Earth, and then start floating down to land in the rural parts of the US and Canada. They don't speak or communicate with people, but they do respond to them.

A beautiful idea. Unfortunately it is like a giant chocolate shell you are served at a dinner party that you eagerly start to cut, expecting that it is hiding some rich desert; only when you cut into it, you find there is nothing beneath it but air. Yes, the visitors are interesting, especially as they begin to eat trees, and excrete cellulose -- which is contradictory since they are later said to need cellulose for their survival. The people in the book aren't interesting though, neither the minor love interest of the "tree-loving" Jerry and his reporter girlfriend, Kathy, nor the President of the United States and various other politicians. None of them have a third dimension that makes them more than stock characters -- and they're dull stock characters too because there is no conflict, no drama in the entire book.

As hard as it is to imagine, the arrival of the visitors and their exclusively landing in the US causes no "International Incident", no political dispute. The entire world seems to basically be yawning as they wait to see what happens. Well, it is different, if not believable in the slightest, not now, at the time of writing, or any time in the last century.

The point of the book seems to be the way the visitors repay earth for the trees they consume -- oh, I said there was no conflict, but there is a Senator who occasionally wakes up long enough to protest a little, but never with anything more than a speech in a gathering of political figures. There's the obligatory general to say "but they might be dangerous", but he also is turned on, by Simak, for a speech or two, and then put back into the toybox where they all seem to reside.

There is an attempt to compare Earth to the Native Americans, losing their civilization by accepting the white man's gifts, and at one point there is a hint of a really scary potential gift, but Simak doesn't do much with either idea, or much of anything else. If he'd stripped the book of ninety percent of its words, and written a short story using the one idea I mentioned, it might have been a major work. If his mention of it on page 220 and then suggesting it again on the last page had been surrounded by anything believable, it might have rescued the book. But by the time you get it, you've stopped thinking, out of self-preservation. Stopped thinking, or caring.

[More blog entries about books, review, sf, sciencefiction, cliffordsimak; böcker, recension, sf, sciencefiction, cliffordsimak.]

Jim Benton, Haunter of the $.99 Shelf

2006-11-06T20:55:00.000+01:00

Jim has a plan for all those cheap paperbacks...

Because I am cheap, broke, and have a high reading speed -- and all three have been true most of my life -- I very rarely buy new books. I much prefer building my library, particularly the fiction part of it, by frequenting thrift stores, second-hand book stores (or used book tables at general book stores) and, since I've been living in Brooklyn, taking advantage of a public library that has permanent book sales in every one of its 40+ branches.

Yes, I lose the chance to walk into a bookstore with a particular book in mind, finding it, and buying it -- provided it is both in print and in stock. But there are a number of compensations.

I like the "grab bag" situation, the never knowing what you will find when you check a particular place. I can check a particular spot four times running and walk out empty-handed, and the next time I may find so many books that I can't carry them all, or afford them even at those prices.

I like the opportunity to take a gamble on an unknown author or book, much easier when what you are risking is $.25-$1.00 rather than $5-$25.

I like the fact that if I have, say, $7.00 to spend, rather than getting just one paperback, I can come home with anywhere from 7 to 70 pbs or hardcovers -- yes, there are places to get books for as little as $.10 for paperbacks and $.25 for hardcovers.

Since I've been doing a fair share of book buying recently, I thought it might be fun to start reviewing the books as I read them. You won't find the latest bestsellers here, but you might find the occasional book or author to look for -- or to avoid. (I'll be doing them as I read them, except that sometimes a book will send me onto my shelves for others by the same author.)

I'll try to check availability for each of them, at least through Amazon and Alibris. So here goes...

[More blog entries about books; böcker.]

Hobbyists' Fair

2006-11-05T21:31:00.000+01:00

Went with my eight-year-old and his pal to a hobbyists' fair this afternoon. A whole gymnasium full of displays on model railroads, cars, airplanes, helicopters, boats. The exhibitors were largely retired gentlemen with a bachelorly air. Most looked like they might run very dusty used-book stores for a living. But there were hobbyist firms there too, and their exhibits of course looked a lot more professional. The visitors were largely parents with kids, mainly dads, and many with a non-urban, non-hip look. Subbacultcha.

The boys had a go at a huge slotcar set and some radio-controlled cars, and then we watched these really good RC people driving cars and piloting airplanes.

I felt a little sad for all the old guys wilting behind their folding tables. Kind of a dying breed, returning to now almost obsolete childhood hobbies after retirement. But the Swedish Model Airplane Association seemed a lot more more vigorous, with a larger display and more people of different ages & genders behind it. Their bimonthly journal is excellent. They also had a pretty cool recruitment drive, handing out simple rubber-band airplane kits for free to all kids who would write their names and adresses on a list.

Some pretty funny software was demonstrated: a model airplane simulator. Yes, you build model airplanes because you dream about flying, and then you get a computer program to simulate such a model airplane as it flies. Very meta.

[More blog entries about hobby, modelrailroads, modelairplanes, slotcars; hobbymässan, modellflyg, modelljärnväg, bilbana.]

Jim Benton on Fundies vs. Gay Marriage

2006-11-05T10:25:00.000+01:00

Why Radical Christians Hate Gay Marriage
By Jim Benton

Openly, the Radical Religious opposition to gay marriage usually makes two arguments.

(The "gays are sinners and are going to hell, and should be prosecuted if the damn Supreme Court hadn't allowed sodomy" claim doesn't get made that much in public. Even red-state America has become accepting enough of gays and lesbians, and opposed to blatant discrimination, that this stance wouldn't sell among the electorate as a whole. But they know the bigots and gay bashers -- especially the ones who take the phrase literally -- will be on their side anyway, they don't have to appeal to them directly.)

The appeal to tradition
They usually start off with the argument to tradition. "Marriage has always been between one man and one woman." With its appeal to a mythical past -- for most people "always" means "in their lifetime and their parents' and grandparents" -- this gets them a certain percentage of the votes.

But let's face it, it is a weak argument if you are trying to scare people onto your side -- and the appeal is to fear, don't get that wrong. Even if the statement were true, even if the idea of marriage hadn't changed throughout time (and certainly the ‘indissolubility of marriage' that is, in fact, Biblical, has changed, to the point that a surprising number of gay marriage opponents are on their second or third marriage) traditions are for those who celebrate them. "Thanksgiving dinner has always included turkey." Well yes, and that is a celebration that I gladly celebrate. But if my neighbor chooses to serve ham or chicken or steak or is a strict vegetarian and serves lasagna, that doesn't make my turkey any less meaningful or tasty to me. In fact, it doesn't affect me unless somebody invites me to a Thanksgiving dinner and serves me chicken, as my mother-in-law once did. Grrrr. (I think I went out after dinner and bought a small turkey platter from a restaurant. This is one celebration I am very devout about.)

But the fact of the matter is that the idea of "marriage means one man and one woman" just ain't so. And when I say this, I am not talking about anthropological evidence from societies throughout the world. Christians would, with a certain amount of justice, argue that it's irrelevant how a society of heathens conduct their life. They are only interested in the Judeo-Christian heritage they so proudly follow.

Unfortunately, that heritage doesn't bear them out. Early Judaism was polygamous, polygynous in fact. And the Christian claim that this was a "special exemption granted to the Patriarchs" is just plain wrong.

"How do we know? The Bible tells us so." At least Leviticus does. The commandments of Leviticus were written for the whole of society, not the patriarchs. If you read the whole of Leviticus 18 -- yes, the very same chapter that condemns male-male anal sex (I know of no verse in the Bible that mentions oral sex of any type) -- you'll find several passages that only make sense in a polygamous society.

The obvious examples start with Leviticus 18:7-9:

7 Do not dishonor your father by having sexual relations with your mother. She is your mother; do not have relations with her.

8 Do not have sexual relations with your father's wife; that would dishonor your father.

9 Do not have sexual relations with your sister, either your father's daughter or your mother's daughter, whether she was born in the same home or elsewhere."

I could go on to quote other verses, but these are enough to show the distinctions that are made between "your mother" and "your father's wife". your sister who is "your father's daughter" and your sister who is "your mother's daughter". Such distinctions only make sense in a polygamous society.

Was this just a dispensation for the times? No. Jewish society remained polygamous at least up until the time of Jesus. Perhaps not in the rural, poor parts of Galilee where Jesus lived. But let us look at what Flavius Josephus has to say. The great general and historian was born into the highest priestly class of Jerusalem, as he proudly relates in his Autobiography. He was almost contemporaneous with Jesus, in fact, he was born within a couple of years of the traditional date of Jesus' death. In the same Autobiography he tells us:

"I was myself brought up with my brother, whose name was Matthias, for he was my own brother, by both father and mother..."

Again, this is a distinction made unnecessary except in a polygamous society. But did Jesus condemn the practice? (He did condemn divorce, but the Old Testament has many condemnations of divorce. In fact, there are several places where a man is told that, because of a crime, such as falsely accusing his wife of not being a virgin, he must remain married to her, yet he is not prohibited from having other wives.) He is not shown to, but then there must have been many preachings of his that did not get recorded in the Gospels. If he did condemn having multiple wives, the writer of the Epistles to Timothy and Titus and the early Church do not seem to have been aware of it. (I'll use the KJV. The New International is better, but a lot of Christians act like they believe "if the King James was good enough for St. Paul, it's good enough for me." And in fact, the statements are stronger in it.)

1 Timothy 3:2. A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife,

1 Timothy 3:12. Let the deacons be the husbands of one wife, ruling their children and their own houses well.

Titus 1:5-7. 5 For this cause left I thee in Crete, that thou shouldest set in order the things that are wanting, and ordain elders in every city, as I had appointed thee:

6 If any be blameless, the husband of one wife, having faithful children not accused of riot or unruly.

7 For a bishop must be blameless, as the steward of God; not selfwilled, not soon angry, not given to wine, no striker, not given to filthy lucre;

But: if these are specific requirements for a bishop or deacon, they can't be the requirements for the people as a whole. They may be considered advisable. Polygamy might be blameworthy, but it is not forbidden. (Thus being self-willed or given to wine are flaws, not forbidden. Imagine if the passage read must not be a murderer and you can see the absurdity.)

Even if this was all that was meant by "traditional marriage", it seems hard to understand how expanding it to include same-sex marriage would be at all threatening to it. This point has been made time and again, both by gays (Barney Frank's question to Bob Barr, "Which of your three marriages is threatened by mine?) and heterosexual couples who deny any feeling of threat from the acceptance of gay marriage.

Marriage as defined by female submission
But, I would argue that while many of the people who make the statement about marriage being threatened are just parroting what they have heard, the Radical Christian opponents actually mean something different when they talk of "traditional marriage". And they are quite right in their argument. Gay marriage is a threat to their conception of what marriage should be.

A "good, Christian marriage" is not just one involving one man and one woman. It involves a specific relationship between them. A wife is supposed to be subject to the husband, and the children to the parents, as humanity is subject to God.

To quote Focus on the Family's What Does It Mean to Be a Wife by Mitch Temple:

The apostle Paul urged older women to teach younger women, "so that they will wisely train the young women to be sane and sober-minded -- temperate, disciplined -- and to love their husbands and their children; to be self-controlled, chaste, homemakers, good-natured (kindhearted), adapting and subordinating themselves to their husbands, that the word of God may not be exposed to reproach — blasphemed or discredited."

Again from FotF (How a Husband Should Handle His Wife's Submission by Stormie Omartian):

"Submission is a choice we make. It's something each one of us must decide to do. And this decision happens first in the heart. If we don't decide in our hearts that we are going to willingly submit to whomever it is we need to be submitted to, then we are not truly submitting."

"This may be shocking news to you, but an overwhelming majority of wives in my survey said they want to submit to their husbands. They want their husbands to be the head of the home, and they have no desire to usurp that God-given position of leadership. They know what the Bible says on the subject, and discerning wives want to do what God wants because they understand that God's ways work best."

"Okay, okay! I know that God did not say a wife needs to submit to her husband only if he proves to be worthy. Submission is a matter of trusting in God more than trusting in man. But a wife will more easily make the choice to submit to her husband if she knows that he has made the choice to submit to the Lord. It will be a sign to her that it is safe to submit to him."

For a similar view let's look at the Southern Baptists. In an article on subjugation of women in that denomination, Dr. Bruce Prescott & Dr. Rick McClatchy (who have become "Mainstream Baptists", a group which split from the Southern Baptists as a protest against the emergence of extreme and rigid conservatism in the older group) write in Baptist Faith and Message, a Baptist "Confession of faith"):

"subjugation of women extended to the privacy of Baptist homes when a statement on the family was added to the BF&M. In line with the chain of command made explicit in the 1984 resolution, the 1998 family amendment advised wives that they must ‘graciously submit' to their husbands."

"The unconditional nature of the wife's subjugation became clear at the official press conference following the statement's adoption. Dorothy Patterson, wife of Paige Patterson and a member of the committee that drafted the family statement, said, ‘When it comes to submitting to my husband even when he is wrong, I just do it. He is accountable to God.'"

But these groups are relatively liberal. I could go on and on -- oh, you've noticed -- but I'll end this by requoting Tedd Tripp, from my article on baby beating.

"You must provide examples of submission for your children. Dads can do this through biblical authority over their wives, and Moms through biblical submission to their husbands." p. 142

"Don't waste time trying to sugarcoat submission to make it palatable. Obeying when you see the sense in it is not submission; it is agreement. Submission necessarily means doing what you do not wish to do. It is never easy or painless." p. 145

"Your children [and by implication, your wife] must understand that when you speak for the first time, you have spoken for the last time." p. 151

But what has all this to do with gay marriage? After all, many, hopefully most marriages outside of the stricter religious groupings would reject these teachings, would look on horror at this sort of authoritarian marriage. (In fact, many people who saw their parents in such a relationship have recoiled in horror at it and made sure they would not experience what they saw their parents, particularly their mothers, undergo.) And there is no doubt that gay relationships can be dominant/submissive themselves.

This is true, but a heterosexual marriage that deviates from "God's plan" can be condemned as such, and there is always hope that through "good Christian example" teaching, preaching, and prayer, these "misguided sinners" can be shown the proper path. (And the true dominionists can hope they will have the power of the state at least to teach students properly, and even have laws that will correct the poor, deluded "equalitarians".)

But there is no way that a gay couple can choose to conform to these teachings. The roles, in the minds of the radical Christians are biologically and theologically based. The question of which gender should be submissive is not a matter of choice. It is rooted in the idea that "man was created first and woman sinned first" in Eden. Yes, a woman may (and should, according to voices like Stormy Omartian's) freely choose to submit to her husband and act according to God's plan. But that is because she is a woman. A man who should choose to submit to his wife, in the same way, would be an unnatural abomination.

And, obviously, same-sex marriages either do not have a woman to "willingly submit to whomever it is we need to be submitted to", or they lack a man to be submitted to. No amount of preaching can change this, no amount of Christian example will change this. Any gay marriage, by existing, challenges this idea of a proper, "traditional" marriage.

Even if one man in a gay marriage chooses the role of homemaker, of the guided one, the "wife", this is not sufficient, since he is going against his masculine nature. (And of course, the corresponding can be said for lesbians, like the two women who were my parents. They have no one to express their femininity to by submitting, and again, if one is dominant, this is condemned as well by the fundies' god and Bible.)

It is a constant threat. No wonder radical Christians are horrified and must fight it. In their way of conceptualising things, gay marriage simply cannot be. And so it must not be. It's basically an issue of road-map versus terrain.

[More blog entries about religion, marriage, gaymarriage, Christianity; religion, äktenskap, homoäktenskap, kristendom.]

Close Yet Far

2006-11-03T11:06:00.000+01:00

My wife's parents live six time zones away in China, and so they have followed most of our daughter's development over videoconferencing. We use MSN Messenger, simple and convenient. And a web cam costs only a few tens of Euros.

Now the ladies of my family have been in China for a week and a half, and I'm the one watching them on-screen. It's actually a mixed blessing. Wonderful to see and hear them, but painful to be reminded so clearly of how lovely they are, yet how distant. Luckily, it's only going to be a few more days before me & junior join them over there.

[More blog entries about videoconferencing, msnm; bildtelefoni, msnm.]

ICQ Gender Wars

2006-11-02T17:37:00.000+01:00

For many years I have spent most of my working days alone at a computer. Alone, but thanks to the internet and messaging software, not lonely. As mentioned here before in connection with the story of Lennart, International Casanova, it's good to have a chat now and then with other solitary souls over ICQ. They become your workmates even though they may be located on the other side of the planet in meatspace terms, to use a quaint 80s cyberpunk expression.

The spidery network of ICQ contacts can also teach you a lot about gender politics. In recent years, I have increasingly been contacted over ICQ by nubile females in Eastern Europe and Asia. These chats are usually very short and follow a simple pattern. The lady in question asks me in shaky English whether I am married, if I have children and what sort of job I have. And when I reply "yes", "yes" and "not a well-paid one", the conversation ceases. With all due respect to these enterprising and fearless ladies, this did get boring really quickly. But the problem mostly disappeared when I entered into my ICQ profile that I am in fact married and have kids.

For the past week I've been alone at home a lot and so have had reason to say "Hey there, how ya doing?" to a lot of random strangers on ICQ. Most people don't reply at all to that sort of message. But among those who did, I quickly noticed another interesting pattern.

Far more males than females replied, and a lot of these males apparently hoped that I might want to have sex with them. This did not seem to be contingent on my income or family configuration, which I find kind of heartwarming in comparison to those grimly goal-orientated Eastern would-be brides. But as soon as it became apparent that I wasn't interested in penis-themed conversation, these chats also ceased.

As for the ladies, the problem was really the opposite. Those few who responded were willing to have a chat, but at the same time they were clearly very guarded. Some started out by telling me, out of the blue, that they were not interested in sex talk or sex pics. This is not how live face-to-face chats with strangers usually begin. "Errrr", responded I, "do you think we might perhaps simply have a civilised conversation?".

Cyber sex is the text-messaging equivalent of phone sex. It's a lot like having to read a very bad pornographic story line by line as it is improvised by someone who's had sex but has never written a story before. It's time-consuming, boring and in my opinion absolutely pointless. The internet is full of porn, a lot of it written and a lot of it written really well. But still, it seems that women on ICQ are absolutely besieged by men who want to have cyber sex and preferably also web cam pics of their anatomy. For women, ICQ seems to be a bit like going to a cocktail party where half of the male guests are insane sex offenders.

So I've made another addition to my ICQ profile. It now reads:

Archaeologist & all-round friendly guy.

Married, two kids. I don't do cyber sex and I don't want to see pics of your boobs or private parts, OK?

Let's see if it works.

[More blog entries about icq, im, cybersex; icq, cybersex.]

I'm Your Man

2006-11-01T11:05:00.000+01:00

A friend of mine asked me if I could find Leonard Cohen's "I'm Your Man" on-line somewhere. So I did a search on Allmusic to see if I could at least find a snippet of the song. Unexpectedly, this search generated an instant poem consisting entirely of song titles. Try reading it out loud without laughing! I didn't get any further than the third line before cracking up.

I'm Your Man
I'm Your Boogie Man
I'm Not Your Man
I'm Your Man '96
I'm Just Your Man
I'm Your Big Man
I'm Your Yes Man
I'm Your Love Man
I'm Your Main Man
I'm Your Loving Man
I'm Yours Man
I'm Your Candy Man
I'm Your Handy Man
I'm Your Lover Man
I'm Your Lovin' Man
I'm Your Pussy Man
I'm Your Taboo Man
I'm the Man for You
I'm Your Fellow Man
I'm Your Rockin' Man
(I'm Your) Hoochie Coochie Man
I'm Your Puppet
I'm Your Angel
I'm Your Country Man
I'm Your Money
I'm Your Woman
I'm Your Man (G.Ü.N.T.H.E.R.)
I'm Your Travellin' Man
I'm Your Fan
I'm Your Man (Stringbean)
I'm Your Man in the Streets
I'm Your Mechanical Man
I'm Your Santa
I'm Your Sure Thing Man
I'm Yours
I'm Your Man, I'm Your Gal
I'm in the Market for You
I'm Your Master
I'm Your Monkey
I'm in Your Hands
I'm Your Fantasy
I'm Your Monster
I'm Your Man (Don't You Know?)
I'm Your No. 1 Fan
I'm a Young Man
I'm Mad at You
I'm Mad With You
I'm on Your Side
I'm Your Hoochie Coohie Man
I'm a Fool to Want You
(I'm Your) Hoochie Koochie Man [DVD]
I'm Your Hocckie Coochie Man
I'm Your Hoochie Couchie Man
I'm Your Mate
I'm a Hog for You
I'm Your Biggest Fan
I'm Your Oilman
I'm Your Sex Machine
I'm Your Superman
Baby I'm Yours
I'm Leaving You
(I'm Your) Jellyman
I'm Your Greatest Fan
When I'm With You
I'm in Love With You
I'm a Fool for You
I'm Your Girl
I'm the Zydeco Man
I'm Yours Anyhow
Baby I'm-A Want You
I'm an Ordinary Man
(I'm A) Southern Man
I'm Madly in Love With You
I'm Your Natural Woman
I'm Your Sideman

[More blog entries about music, humour, surrealism; musik, humor, surrealism.]

Planet X, Zecharia Sitchin and I

2006-10-31T13:03:00.000+01:00

I grew up among science-friendly but non-skeptical people. My parents gladly paid my subscription to a pop-sci magazine. Vaccination and antibiotics were uncontroversial. But so were Gestalt therapy, herbal medicine, church service, youth choir, Bible study groups, evening prayer, Rosen Method therapy, acupressure, osteopathy, chiropractic and Hazelden self-help groups.

When I finished ninth grade in 1987 (thus graduating from mandatory school), the headmistress rewarded me for my grades with a copy of Strange Stories, Amazing Facts, a weighty volume issued by Reader's Digest in 1976. I had already read the book from one end to another repeatedly in the school library, where it was about the first thing I had found. (I spent recess for much of six years in that library with my friends). And it actually reads a lot like the Snopes urban legends site, but without the debunking. Ghost stories and scientific trivia mixed in one big salad: Strange Anecdotes and Amazing Unsupported Statements. My school not only offered such materials while I was a pupil, in effect it also encouraged me to continue reading them as an adult.

I don't remember anyone presenting me with a generally skeptical perspective or the basics of critical thinking at home nor at school. The truth of any statement was based upon social acceptance, and in 1980s middle-class Stockholm much, but far from all, of this accepted truth was based in science. Nobody seemed to care much about the foundations of truth. Challenging someone's beliefs was seen as rude and recalcitrant behaviour.

The first instance I recall of anyone actively questioning conventional wisdom was in high-school when my friend Tor told me about his dad's attitude to astrology. Aage is an astronomer, and he didn't just not believe much in astrology, he vehemently opposed it. This was a novel idea to someone who had grown up with Boomer parents always going off on "a course" or being "in therapy". Tor's parents, both research scientists, became role models for me. I borrowed their copy of Carl Sagan's pop-sci book Cosmos (1980) and liked it a lot. I remember being amused by the bit towards the end where Sagan advocates pre-marital sex as a way of helping young people feel better about themselves and life in general. I agreed completely, having been lucky in that regard.

So I think it's fair to say that during high-school I developed a healthy skepticism. It was certainly part of me by the time I became an undergrad. But still, I did fall for some pretty bad woo-woo in my senior year.

My final term paper was about what was then called Planet X, the question whether there might be an undiscovered tenth planet beyond Pluto. This issue has since been resolved with the insight that Pluto is actually a member of a numerous class of small icy bodies way out there, forming the Kuiper Belt, with no sign of anything even the size of Mercury orbiting beyond Neptune, let alone another gas giant. There is no tenth planet – there never even really was a ninth one.

Aage photocopied some papers on the Planet X issue and lent me books, of which Mark Littman's Planets Beyond (1988) was particularly good and afforded much material. But I had also found another book on my own in the local bookstore that I liked a lot and saw as highly relevant to the Planet X issue. Here's what 17-year-old me had to say about Zecharia Sitchin's The 12th Planet (1978):

"The first civilisation on Earth appeared very suddenly about 4000 BC in Mesopotamia, modern Iraq. This Sumerian culture was very advanced and created the basis for all human civilisation. In his book The 12th Planet, the Jewish American prehistorian Zecharia Sitchin poses the question how this happened, and points out a large number of anomalies in the extant historical record. His thesis is that humankind and civilisation were created by alien beings, and he supports his arguments with everything from linguistics to astronomy.

The astronomical aspect of Sumerian culture is particularly interesting – Sitchin quotes cuneiform tablets that indicate that the Sumerians had exceptionally advanced astronomy that can only be compared to what we have today. Not only did they have a heliocentric view of the universe and detailed knowledge about the stars all around Earth – they also appear to have had knowledge of all the planets known to us, plus yet another one! A Sumerian document says: 'All in all twelve members, counting the Sun and the Moon, form the orbits of the planets'.

The Sumerians saw this tenth planet as the abode of the gods, and considered it to orbit far beyond Pluto. Drawing upon Sumerian descriptions of the planet and its orbit, Sitchin suggests a planet in a sharply elliptic orbit with a mass several times that of the Earth and an orbital period of 3600 years – he also believes that it must have a highly active core leading to a high temperature in order for life (the alien visitors) to be able to survive so far from the Sun.

Generally, for a fairly notorious genre, Sitchin's book makes an unusually matter-of-fact impression – he does get a bit too enthusiastic sometimes, and then his insufficient knowledge of natural science is laid bare, but his arguments regarding the Sumerian sources are fairly sober. If Sitchin's interpretation of the Sumerian sources is correct, then we can look forward to another visit by the twelfth planet to the inner reaches of the solar system about AD 3600."

To be fair to my younger self, I should point out that I didn't mention Sitchin in the paper's conclusions, which are quite cautious and concentrate on the weird orbits of Neptune's moons. My main problem while writing the paper was clearly that I knew absolutely nothing about Mesopotamian archaeology and didn't check even a basic textbook on the subject. I did know a bit of science and was skeptical of Sitchin in that area, but I didn't extrapolate this skepticism into fields where I knew nothing. I was supervised by my physics teacher, an engineering school dropout who probably knew about as much as I did about ancient Mesopotamia. The task I had set myself was to read up on planetary astronomy, and I don't remember ever thinking that I might have to read any more archaeology. This is actually typical of a lot of interdisciplinary pseudoscience produced by far more mature people. But I got a good grade for the paper and no complaints from the teacher. Only one of the admittedly few readers was rude and recalcitrant enough to question my endorsement of Sitchin: Tor, the son of scientists.

[More blog entries about skepticism, astronomy, archaeology, zechariasitchin; skepticism, skepsis, arkeologi, astronomi, zechariasitchin.]

Swedish Psychedelic Rock

2006-10-29T22:08:00.000+01:00

Believe it or not, Dear Reader, but Sweden has produced a number of great psychedelic rock records. I'm going to tell you about three of my favourites, all of them with lyrics in Swedish, although the music is Anglo-American in style. But first some background.

The word "psychedelic" originally had nothing to do with music. It's a 1950s neologism meaning "mind manifesting". When hallucinogenic drugs began to become common, there was a debate among American psychiatrists about terminology. Should the drugs be seen as psychotomimetic, that is, do they mimic or cause (temporary) psychosis? This was the wary position. Or should they be seen as unlocking and manifesting a hidden positive potential in the human brain? This was the enthusiastic position, taken by people like Timothy Leary. Medical literature currently simply uses the word "hallucinogenic", since it's an accurate description of the substances' effect without entailing any hypotheses about the neurochemical nature of psychosis. And stoners say "psychedelic", particularly stoner musicians and their fans -- like me.

Psychedelic music was born in the 60s when rock and pop musicians discovered LSD and expressed their experiences with the drug through music. Albums commonly cited as the first examples of psych music are the Beatles' Revolver and the 13th Floor Elevators' Psychedelic Sounds, both released in 1966. One defining characteristic of the style is of course hallucinatory lyrics. But musically, it is largely a matter of the era's rapidly improving sound technology being used to produce weird otherworldly sounds, portraying the sensations produced by LSD. The Beatles' first psych song, "Rain" is heavily processed on all channels, some vocals even running backwards. "Tomorrow Never Knows" is a pounding, gibbering nightmare of tape loops. It would be very hard to produce convincing psych music using only acoustic instruments. It's music fulfilling Rimbaud's 1871 dictum that the poet should proceed through "long, immense and rational derangement of all the senses". Good psychedelic music can't be made while the musician is tripping, it takes a calculating artistic mind. Rational derangement.

So psych was born as pop. But a heavier streak was apparent already with the 13th Floor Elevators. Guitarists in the blues tradition quickly picked up the influences, along with new guitar effect pedals and amp feedback (which had first been committed to vinyl by the Beatles). Thus Jimi Hendrix, the great innovator of psychedelic rock, could make completely insane sounds live in a way that the studio-dwelling Beatles would never even attempt. His debut album Are You Experienced? from 1967 completed the sonic psych palette as we still know it. And people in Sweden were listening.

Our first great psych record is Pugh Rogefeldt's Ja, Dä Ä Dä from 1969. (The title means "Yes it is" in an exaggerated rural dialect, from one of the songs where Rogefeldt plays the part of a jilted lover who tells us through gritted teeth that he feels JUST FINE now that his girlfriend's left him. IT'S FINE. YES IT IS.) And Rogefeldt hadn't just learned the psychedelic lesson: he's funky as all hell too, with the great Georg Wadenius on bass and Janne Carlsson on drums, who had jammed with Hendrix and formed a duo with Bo Hansson. Dear Reader, Steal This Record.

Swedish 70s music unfortunately got bogged down in leftist political correctness and a misdirected concern with authenticity that made sure that ABBA (who were roundly denounced as commercial studio trash at the time) and a few punk acts were the only bands that came out of the decade sounding good. And the 80s were a psychedelic wasteland, no Paisley Underground here. But the 90s saw renewed interest in psych and progressive rock (no, Swedish readers, I'm not referring to Swedish progg). And so we reach another one of my favourite albums.

I'm very proud to say that I was down with Qoph before they even had a record deal. I heard them at a band competition in Stockholm a year or two before they released 1998's Kalejdoskopiska Aktiviteter, and they absolutely blew me away. The album's title means "Kaleidoscopic Activities", and they truly are. This is Hendrix territory with a lot of early 70s prog influences, particularly Captain Beyond whom Qoph outshine entirely. The blues roots are proudly exhibited, and though most of the material is way trippy and experimental, one song is a straight electric blues number. This album is a national treasure.

One of the redeeming qualities of the Swedish 70s obsession with musical authenticity was that the country's ethnic music (mainly fiddle-based) was rediscovered and reimagined by young people. There were good psychedelic takes on this stuff already at the time, notably by Kenny Håkansson and Kebnekaise who are still a great live act. But in my opinion, the best Swedish ethnic psych album is Dungen's Stadsvandringar from 2002 (it means "Strolls through the city"). And the band leader was born only in 1979, after the records that would come to influence him had been in the stores for years. But I don't need to tell you about Dungen, they were on Conan O'Brien a year ago. And they have a new album due next year.

So: Pugh Rogefeldt, funky Swedish psychedelic rock. Qoph, bluesy Swedish psychedelic rock. And Dungen, ethnic Swedish psychedelic rock. You know you need them to finally manifest your minds.

[More blog entries about music, rock, pop, psychedelic, Sweden; musik, rock, pop, psykedelisk.]

Hare Krishna Dinner

2006-10-27T18:15:00.001+02:00

I'm having dinner at this Hare Krishna restaurant, and a small drama has played out before me.

I usually don't put money into cults like the H.K., but the food is really good and they don't proselytise. I've come here for almost 20 years now, and I've seen the head waiter grow middle-aged, his forelock abandoned for a televangelist haircut that makes him look like a presidential candidate.

As I was eating, three people came in, arguing in hushed tones. An attractive 45ish lady, slightly worn, wanted to have dinner here. But she was having trouble with her male companion, a tall, very worn 50ish guy. The place made him nervous, he whispered plaintively, and he kept trying to flee out the door into the street. This made the woman angry. Another woman, 40ish, short, stocky and slightly hunched with inward-pointing toes and a red braid, tried to placate the two.

Us other diners all clearly felt embarrassed by the display, shrinking into our chairs, some whispering among themselves. I don't know why these three people gave off such an outsider vibe. I fancied they came here from a drugs rehab session or a mental daycare institution. But of course I don't know anything about their lives.

Finally the hungry lady gave up her attempts to eat here and went to get a doggy bag. Her beau immediately took the chance to zip out the door. As the presidential candidate transferred the woman's veggie food to a box, she ran out after the guy, calling his name, telling him off in a hushed angry voice. When they were gone, everyone breathed a sigh of the relief that comes of restored normality. And the chanting and finger cymbals on the loudspeakers droned on.

Fornvännen's Autumn Issue

2006-10-26T21:25:00.000+02:00

The autumn issue of Fornvännen arrived a week or two ago, and I've somehow forgotten to write about it. As usual, it's full of exciting stuff.

Patrik Gustafsson and Mikael Nordin of the Södermanland County Museum in Nyköping report on survey work in Kolmården, a mountainous forest that formed an uninhabited boundary zone between the tribal territories of the Svear and Götar back in the 1st Millennium AD. Patrik and Mikael have located a number of Early Mesolithic shore-bound sites up there, dating from the 7th and 8th Millennia cal BC. Shore displacement in these parts has been dramatic.

Helmer Gustavson, John Hamilton and Laila Kitzler Åhfeldt of Stockholm report on the fragments of at least three Migration Period pictorial stelae found in later graves at Tomteboda on the outskirts of Stockholm. One of the stones has had a runic inscription, which is very rare at that early date, but unfortunately too few runes survive for them to be read. As part of the upheavals in the mid-6th century, people were clearly vandalising stone monuments erected only decades before.

David Damell and Martin Edlund in Örebro report on excavations at Råsvalslund in northern Västmanland. Far from any other known Viking Period settlements, they have found a large and affluent village with innovative construction techniques and well-equipped graves. David and Martin argue that the village's prosperity must have been founded upon iron production, which is well attested for the Viking Period in the area. They also found something really unusual: a bronze fishing lure!

There are a number of shorter items as well in this issue, but I'll just point out Henrik Thrane's opinion piece, which I really like. In the 1990s a funny tubular pottery object was found at a Bronze Age settlement near Norrköping. The excavators interpreted it as a damaged female figurine, something I couldn't really see at the time as they didn't offer even vaguely similar comparative material. But what do I know about the Bronze Age? Anyway, Thrane has now demolished their interpretation. As it turns out, the tubular thing is an ornate bellows nozzle used for bronze casting. It belongs to a common artefact class known from most of Continental Europe and discussed in the literature for over a century. It's just that this is the first time that it's identified among Swedish finds. And it took a senior Danish colleague to get it straight.

I think the poorly founded figurine idea was a typical result of overspecialisation: Swedish contract archaeologists are absolutely ace at fieldwork, but they rarely have any opportunity to learn about small finds. Nor are there any formalised channels for them to communicate with Sweden's few professional finds specialists. But I'm always glad to look at finds photographs. Keep 'em coming to my mailbox, folks!

[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden; arkeologi.]

Four Stone Hearth

2006-10-26T11:00:00.000+02:00

In addition to Alun's Vidi, a new archaeology blog carnival has just started at Anthropology.net. The Four Stone Hearth carnival covers anthropology in the American sense of the word:

Socio-cultural anthropology
Bio-physical anthropology
Archaeology
Linguistic anthropology

Check it out! But don't let the four standing stones in the picture fool you -- that's not a hearth.

And don't miss the 46th Skeptics' Circle over at Left Brain/Right Brain.

They're Digging In Sigtuna

2006-10-25T22:29:00.000+02:00

This afternoon I drove up to Sigtuna to check out the excavations there. A treatment centre for MS sufferers are building an extension to their premises, which has given my colleagues an opportunity to dig a big whopping trench a stone's throw from the town museum. Anders Wikström heads the dig and he's got quite a team, including a number of archaeology PhDs waiting for the Boomers to retire from the universities. They've been digging since late May, and yesterday they were all absolutely drenched by rain.

The town of Sigtuna was founded in the late 10th century as a successor to Birka. Unlike Birka, it was a Christian centre and soon received a great number of stone churches, one of which was the first brick building in the Lake Mälaren area. But Sigtuna's heyday was brief and power moved on to Uppsala and Stockholm. Since about AD 1200, the town has been a quiet little place. American tourists always find it entertaining that its name sounds like "sick tuna".

The site under excavation has been farmland since the Late Middle Ages, so the team came down into 11th century urban layers really quickly. The stratigraphy is only one to two meters deep with a lot of subsoil contour. Part of the trench holds the edge of a Medieval churchyard with over 200 burials excavated so far. Interestingly, this is the first time in Sigtuna that a churchyard is found dug into earlier urban strata. This would indicate that the churchyard post-dates a re-planning event, possibly having to do with a processional street established to take celebrants around every church in town. This street has been clearly identified in the current dig. Before that, the area held unusually large and unusually orientated buildings, bringing to mind the high-status long houses on earthen platforms along the northern edge of the dense proto-urbanisation at Birka. So far, though, there are no strong indications of any wealthy inhabitants of the houses.

[More blog entries about vikings, vikingperiod, middleages, archaeology, Sweden; vikingatiden, medeltiden, arkeologi, Sigtuna.]

Another Bog Body Song

2006-10-25T21:10:00.000+02:00

I've talked before about a great song about a bog body, The Triffids' "Jerdacuttup Man". Now Markus Andersson has pointed me to another song in this lyrical niche, The Mountain Goats' "Tollund Man". It's from the 1995 disc Sweden. The Goats are actually mostly one Californian guy named John Darnielle, and the music is a wistful little piece with just an acoustic guitar, a bass and vocals.

Tollund man
by John Darnielle

I was sitting at the edge of the marsh
when the council came to bring me the news.
They handed me a bowl of cooked wild grasses and they
gave me the ceremonial shoes.

Goodbye young Danish women.
Goodbye Danish sky.
Goodbye cold air I am going away.
Goodbye goodbye goodbye.

The Tollund man is an uncommonly well preserved Danish bog body found in 1950 near Silkeborg in Jutland. He was hanged and his body buried in a bog some time in the 4th century BC.

Why these people were killed and bogged is a matter of dispute. Some point to something Tacitus wrote and suggest they were army deserters or gay men, which cannot explain the many female bog bodies. Others contend they were simply criminals, sacrifices or criminals used as sacrifices. Most recently, Allan Lund has suggested that some bog bodies are victims of witch hunts, as occur still in some African cultures. This would explain the often extremely violent deaths of these people, as well as the unusual disposal of their bodies. Bogs may have been seen as safe for getting rid of dangerous bodies with uncanny powers.

[More blog entries about music, mountaingoats, archaeology, denmark; musik, mountaingoats, mosslik, arkeologi, danmark.]

Music Review: Roy Zimmerman, Faulty Intelligence

2006-10-24T21:08:00.000+02:00

Roy Zimmerman's new disc Faulty Intelligence has fifteen songs. The playlist is carefully composed with one rootsy revival song, "Glory Bound Train" split into three recurring interludes (it derides Bush II's millennarism). But who listens to albums any more? The first thing I did with the CD when I took it out of the case was to stick it in my PC and rip it to MP3. Then I listened to the songs on my handheld computer: slowly, at intervals, one song at a time, like one would eat a box of expensive chocolate. And since the files were on the handheld, I listened to some in alphabetical order and others on shuffle. I guess my message to musicians is "Forget about song order, just put the files on-line and give me a PayPal button on your web site, please".

Musically, the album is extremely varied, with each song performed and produced in an appropriate style. Zimmerman and his band easily adopt the instrumentation and voice for every occasion. I found myself waiting in vain for a reggae tune. Maybe next time.

Spy spoofing "CIDIAFBI" sounds like the theme from a lost 60s Bond movie. "My Conservative Girlfriend" is a John Denver love song. "Chickenhawk" is an honest-to-goodness country tune about armchair jocks sending the neighbours' kid to war: "I didn't walk the walk but I can talk the talk -- bawk bawk bawk". "Creation Science 101" is a rousing Jerry Lee Lewis number where Zimmerman assumes the role of a teacher at a Christian college. "Hello, NSA" is an early Elvis ballad: "I love you because you really... listen".

"Intelligent Design" is another Bush-bashing country tune, but not directly about evolution as one might expect. "Saddam Shame" is a folkie guitar strummer with exquisite lyrics. "When the Saints Go Marching Into New Orleans" is a perfect-pitch roots blues tune about NOLA -- with a complete horns section. "That Is The War On Terror", sets the album's most seriously angry lyrics to an 80s FM radio rocker.

"Ingles" comments bilingually on the Mexican immigration situation with much Chicano guitar-strumming. It forms an interesting companion piece to Tom Lehrer's slightly chauvinist "In Old Mexico" where the country south of the border is simply somewhere grotty to go on vacation.

The album also offers an astonishingly accurate Al Green impersonation to genuinely soulful accompaniment -- pretty fly for a white guy! Croons Zimmerman in a falsetto so libidinous it'll give you instant bed head: "Abstain with me baby, all night long..."

"Turn Off The Hubble" is a cabaret tune about how much easier it would be for everybody to deal with the Universe if we didn't actually have to know anything about it. This Central European oompah vibe also underpins the sublime "Defenders of Marriage", about how shocking it is that gay people might want to do something so decadent and perverted as to exchange vows and settle down. "It's unnatural!"

Toward the end of the disc, "America" sounds a lot like a token "I'm not a traitor to the nation" number after all the cynicism and satirical vitriol of the other songs. "God bless America – it just might work!" But maybe I'm misreading some layer of irony here.

The bottom line on Roy Zimmerman is that we have a new Tom Lehrer on our hands. But this time he hasn't just got a grand piano and a razor wit, he has a full band, and he's doing every song in a new style. If you like music, if you like satire, and if your politics are even the tiniest bit left of Rush Limbaugh, then this a record for you.

[More blog entries about music, review, satire, politics, royzimmerman; musik, recension, satir, politik, royzimmerman.]

Flash Of Insight

2006-10-24T20:30:00.000+02:00

Back in August I wrote something about how not to go about a skeptical approach to religious texts. Today that entry received a comment of such rare insight that I feel I must share it with you, Dear Reader.

Yes I know there is meta physical. AFter all, I don't dream and yet I had 2 dreams over 2 consecutive days and then the next day on each I watched in amazement as they replayed the stories on TV I had dreampt. ON the channel I was watching and at that time. So now I do believe in reincarnation because of those 2 dreams one in another life and 1 in another death that took place.

This is on a par with the best works of Swedish philosophers S. Granvik and M. Bos.

Dark Art

2006-10-22T21:31:00.000+02:00

Lovers of outré and darkly baroque art, Goths of every stripe and anyone who’s read and enjoyed Peake’s Titus Groan -- there’s an exhibition on in Stockholm that you don’t want to miss.

As his farewell show, retiring museum director Hans Henrik Brummer has put together one hell of a triple feature at the Waldemarsudde art museum. He calls it "Unsafe Spaces".

The show starts off with a huge room devoted to the sixteen numbers of 18th century Italian printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi's Carceri d'Invenzione ("Fantasy Prisons", or why not, "Fantasy Dungeons"). I'd only seen a few of them before and never at the original large scale. Incredible stuff; kaleidoscopic subterranean vistas peopled by faceless tiny figures scaling endless stairs. Coleridge loved them. Doré copied them. Escher reimagined them as Moebius strips.

F.D. Nomé. King Asa of Judah destroying the Idols. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Not in the Stockholm exhibition.

The next room introduced me to 17th century painter François de Nomé. He too was obsessed with fantasy architecture depicted in dramatic chiaroscuro -- but he preferred to paint it at the moment when it is tumbling down. His paintings may be named "Aeneas flees the burning Troy" or "The Martyrium of St. Catherine", but such mythological matter is only afforded a little corner of each canvas. The rest is devoted to Boschian filigree towers, collapsing arches and burning cities.

In the final two rooms, contemporary painter Ulrik Samuelsson has collected a number of his own canvases together with anonymous works of 15th and 16th century church art. And Samuelsson has taste. The most striking piece is a grotesquely gory and tortured Christ, sculpted at a superhuman scale, originally part of the triumphal crucifix in Sorunda church, Södermanland. This masterful sculpture is extremely stylized and non-naturalistic, to the point where the man's twisted body looks a bit like that of an emaciated horse. Utter madness, and still tightly controlled. Christ as pagan god or tribal idol, wild stuff.

Then there's a life-sized St. Anne from Frötuna church in Uppland, her paint and gilding largely flaked away, but still smiling beatifically. The sculptures are beautifully lit and neither is behind glass: St. Anne you can actually walk around with your nose a hair's breadth from the piece, and study the hollowed back that was never intended to be seen. It's a rare treat indeed to be able to engage so intimately with Medieval wooden sculpture.

"Unsafe Spaces" will be on until 7 January 2007. Prepare to get your mind blown.

[More blog entries about art, piranesi, fantasy, horror, Sweden; konst, piranesi, fantasy, skräck.]

Carnivalesque 20 On-line

2006-10-22T09:21:00.000+02:00

I've heard Henrik Karll of Recent Finds described as "a Danish Rundkvist, only a bit younger and with more facial hair". Heroically overcoming his many afflictions, Henrik is a productive blogger and has just put the 20th edition of the Carnivalesque history blog carnival on-line. It's about history, and this instalment is on the Early Modern Period. The next one will cover Ancient and Medieval history.

Vidi 5 On-Line

2006-10-21T21:06:00.000+02:00

Alun Salt has put the fifth instalment of his one-man blog carnival Vidi on-line, all about archaeology and ancient history. Good stuff!

Kitchen Ascetism

2006-10-21T10:32:00.000+02:00

I have an ascetic side to my mind. Making do with whatever's available and not buying anything unnecessary gives me a deep sense of satisfaction. And I'm a bit of a neat freak (on the macro scale -- never mind dusting). This means that most of the family's leftovers are eaten by me. And you won't see me leave an old pencil lying around on the sidewalk if I see one. Waste not, want not.

But I'm also lazy. (That's part of what drives my ascetism -- I'd rather not have to go to the shops). So I rarely cook anything complicated or time-consuming. And that means that our kitchen cupboards and freezer fill up with opened packages of foodstuffs that take some time to prepare.

I'm now looking at a bit more than two weeks of bachelor life while my wife and daughter are in China, starting tomorrow. Half of the time my son will be with me. And I've set myself a little task: we're going to live off of what's in the cupboards and freezer, not buying any unnecessary food. We'll eat like kings -- I'll just have to make the effort to cook dinners one day in in advance to have them ready for the microwave when I've picked up Junior from school.

When my wife comes home and sees the empty cupboards, she will flip her lid. Empty foodstores is an absolute horror to her. But that's the way I like my stores: echoing voids, clean and neat. I can sit in a corner and nibble contendedly on the last piece of crispbread, washed down with tap water. In control -- no threatening piles of chickpeas and tapioca making any demands on my time.

[More blog entries about food; mat.]

Your Friendly Music Critic

2006-10-18T21:50:00.000+02:00

Marketing a work of art through reviews in the media is a risky business. If you're manufacturing vacuum cleaners, all you have to do is make sure your product works well and isn't too expensive, and the media will say so when they test vacuum cleaners. But art is all about taste. Your product may end up in the hands of a reviewer who simply doesn't like vacuum cleaners at all, as it were, and pans them because they aren't toasters. If that happens you haven’t just lost money by sending out stuff for free – the negative publicity may also hurt sales.

But all artists need media exposure to survive. So what do you do? You identify reviewers who like your kind of art, and who have access to media with a reasonable number of readers, and you send them your product. This happened to me for the first time today.

Metaphor Records in San Anselmo, California, knows (from Google) that I’m a Roy Zimmerman fan and (from Technorati) that my blog has a not inconsiderable number of daily readers. They’re gambling that sending Zimmerman’s new album to people like me will help create the all-important buzz among potential buyers of the album. Such people are likely to be vastly overrepresented among the readers of a blog like mine, and so the blog functions as a highly selective marketing channel. If you can just get information about your product past the blogger and into the channel.

In my new-found role as part of the music industry, I will in fact review the album soon. I haven’t listened to it yet, and I don’t know what I’ll say about it, but come on – what am I likely to think about an album of songs ridiculing the war on terror, abstinence pledges and creationism? Metaphor Records certainly seem to know pretty well what I’m going to say. And I have a feeling I'll be furthering their purposes with a smile on my face and a chuckle in my belly.

[More blog entries about media, marketing, music, royzimmerman; media, musik, reklam, royzimmerman.]

Ancient Småland

2006-10-17T22:26:00.000+02:00

Another Swedish archaeologist has taken up blogging: check out Pierre Petersson's AHIMKAR! Pierre's approach so far is much more hard-core than mine: every second week he publishes a long essay in Swedish on the archaeology and early history of the Småland coast in southeast Sweden.

Although far from my parts, Pierre's hunting grounds are linked to mine by the ancient sea route from Denmark to the Lake Mälaren area and onward east to Finland and Russia. Load some good stuff on those cogs going north, Pierre!

[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden; arkeologi, Småland.]

Clean Hands

2006-10-16T12:53:00.000+02:00

The new Swedish government is going through a process of intense journalistic scrutiny, and it's taking its toll: both the Minister for Trade Maria Borelius and the Minister for Culture Cecilia Stegö Chilò have been forced to resign only a week after their appointment. Neither has paid the state broadcasting fees for years, and Stegö Chilò has employed a housekeeper without paying taxes.

Borelius made the mistake of trying to defend herself: "I couldn't afford it". This would have been a silly defense in any case, since we can't have government ministers subscribing to the view that if you want something you can't afford (in this case, access to state TV channels) then you should just steal it. But Borelius is in fact an unusually affluent person, so her words were a big fat slap in the face to the average Joe.

Stegö Chilò didn't make any silly statements, but of course she had to go too. The Minister for Culture is the boss of the state broadcasting company.

Some people think these issues are negligible. But I'm really glad to be living in a country where it matters to a politician's career whether they play by the rules or not. And I'm glad to see the press really doing its job and not just reporting on reality TV.

[More blog entries about politics, Sweden; politik, regeringen.]

Darndest Things

2006-10-15T13:12:00.000+02:00

From the table conversation of my eight-year old son and his pal a moment ago.

A: My willy is protesting against my brain. My kidneys are protesting.

S: Is your kidney full of saffron?

Pancake absurdism. I have spawned a monster.

[More blog entries about children; barn.]

Science Fiction Fanzine

2006-10-15T11:53:00.000+02:00

Blogging is nothing new. It's been going on at least since the 1860s when the amateur press movement started. H.P. Lovecraft's writing career, for instance, took off in 1914 thanks to this little world of home-made magazines. Since World War 2 they've been called fanzines, and they've been integral to the science fiction and alternative music subcultures. Now they've largely transcended their paper substrate and entered the realm of immediate low-cost digital availability. Fanzines are on the net. The amateur press movement has exploded into the blogosphere.

Paradoxically, one of the few groups that still produce paper fanzines is science fiction fandom. In this day and age, these avant-garde champions of futurity still cherish the mimeograph and the Xerox machine, still hate the Post Office, still keep paper mailing lists. It's part of their subcultural identity. But a lot of the material in the paper zines also appears on-line.

Yesterday I was given one of these increasingly rare cultural artefacts by the kind and charming Anna Davour. It's the expanded paper incarnation of her blog and contains a lot of interesting stuff, including book reviews and discussion of the relationship between fanzines and blogs. I particularly liked Anna's piece on baby carrying shawl fandom.

Shawls are more Bronze Age than futurism, but Swedish sf fanzines have had a nebulous relationship to actual sf for decades. They're the lifeblood of a subculture more than commentary on a literary genre.

[More blog entries about sf, sciencefiction, fanzines; sf, sciencefiction, fanzin.]

Homage to Gothenburg

2006-10-15T00:05:00.000+02:00

I've lived for almost all of my life in Stockholm. But there's another Swedish city that has a special place in my heart. It's a bit smaller, but at the same time much more international. It's friendlier and less pretentious than Stockholm. It seems as if the salty sea and the winds out of the Atlantic have created a less constricted climate in this city, as if the Jante Law doesn't really apply there. I am, of course, referring to Gothenburg. And this is my homage to that great city.

Hasselblad, Volvo, SKF – Gothenburg has real factories and working class neighbourhoods. Other towns, such as Uppsala for instance, feel like stage sets in comparison. Then there are the landshövdingehus, cosy three-story apartment buildings with a stone ground story and wooden upper stories. The one-room apartments there are great, with the kitchen the same size as the living room.

In the middle of the city's main square is an equestrian statue of Carolus X Gustavus, who took Bohuslän County from the Norwegians at the Peace of Tönsberg in 1656. The square was laid out in 1536 at the initiative of Jörgen Kock, the powerful mayor and mint master of Gothenburg. There's also a great Chinese restaurant at the square, but I don't know its name.

The Slottsskogen gardens are magnificent in all seasons: they are reached through the elaborate wrought-iron gates that open to the public daily in the afternoon. The masterpiece of the garden designer Beatrice Crafoord (a niece of Selma Lagerlöf), who worked there for more than 30 years, the winding pathways and landscaped terraces that stretch down the far side of the hill within the enclosure represent a glorious melding of European and American traditions. According to the British garden historian Jane Brown, Slottsskogen in Gothenburg "is a garden far, far superior to either Sissinghurst Castle or Hidcote Manor in design, and it ranks (as they cannot) with the greatest gardens in the world."

Örgryte is Gothenburgs most colourful neighbourhood with a lively market and stores and restaurants from all of the world. It has the city's first planned, large-scale housing estates for the working class and is a result of the growing industrial city in the late 19th century. The labour movement was influential here.

All the really good Swedish music comes out of Gothenburg, and of course you buy it at Bengans.

Gothenburg is the place where I spent the most intense years of my childhood. The place has changed over the years due to hurricanes and mass tourism, but to me it was (kitschy as it may sound) Paradise. The first thing we did in the mornings was to take a long swim in the ocean. After that my sis' and me collected seashells, built sandcastles or went into the jungle to look for cenotes. The beach was our living room, our dining room and our playground. I learned to ride a bike in the sand. My sister and me had palm tree climbing contests. And since then I have a permanent craving for coconuts and coconut milk...

And I love getting ginger truffles from the Kanold Girls, or having lentil soup at the Greek place in the market hall.

I went to Gothenburg in May. Lots of pubs, ranging from the old-school gay Bierstube over posh cafés to traditional ale houses. Furthermore, the total clash of architecture – something old, something new, something ugly, something beautiful.

I am wistful for the graciousness of my former home in Gothenburg, an apartment building called the Falbygden, which sits conveniently at Avenyn. Built, like many of the city's grand establishments, at the turn of the last century, it has an unsurpassable lobby, a cavernous and impeccably maintained confection of polished mosaic floors, luxuriously veined marble pillars and chinoiserie murals, amounting to what one visitor likened, not unreasonably, to a bathhouse in Budapest. The Eisenhowers lived there, as do a number of contemporary writers and public figures, and it is said that National Security kept an apartment overlooking the Russian Trade Federation across the road.

The English Garden, in the middle of Gothenburg, is the largest metropolitan park in all of Europe. A perfect day can be spent moments away from the busy main street, but never hearing, seeing, or smelling it. Lounge by the Isbäcken stream, jump in on a hot day, read or nap. When you can't lounge horizontally any longer, hop on your bike for a five minute ride to the Sjöhusen open-air restaurant. There are exponentially fewer tourists than at the Chinese Tower! The food and drink are totally Deutsch and very delicious, and even though it says not to, most people feed the birds – the tables sit right on the water, so you could even stick your toes in if you felt like it.

I love strolling in Haga and on the university campus, looking at incomprehensible sculptures that look like they may be intended to sit on.

The Cathedral's silhouette has dominated Gothenburg for more than 800 years. Already in the 11th century there was probably a small wooden church here with a churchyard. In the 1120s, building of the first stone church was begun, a basilica half as large as the current structure. In 1251 a royal coronation took place here, when Valdemar, son of Earl Birger and brother of Magnus Lockbarn, was crowned. In the 14th century the church was extended to its current length and the western façade was completed.

The Kock House is also a gem, one of Gothenburg's best-preserved 16th century buildings, a red brick structure with an ornate stepped gable. One of the city's best restaurants, The Seasons, currently resides in the vaulted basement.

My paternal grandparents lived in Gothenburg near the outskirts of the city, with a huge amount of undeveloped land behind their house. My favourite memories are spending time with my grampie in his greenhouse, the smell of wet soil stayed in your clothes. The second memory is climbing the hill behind their house – years before, someone had built a makeshift wooden tipi on top of the hill. I would wander around on top of the ridge looking out over the old city in one direction and wilderness in the other. It was beautiful.

Don't miss the Universeum science centre! Great for kids.

The Angel of the North is surprisingly beautiful, given that it's rusty iron. Whether you arrive by car or train it's prominent overlooking from a nearby hill. It gives a real sense that you're arriving or departing from the city. The view across the river Göta as you arrive into the station by train is also impressive. The cranes of the shipyards stand out along the banks and you can see several bridges between Gothenburg on the south bank and Hisingen on the north.

Erik Andersson used to live in Gothenburg, and he's sort of left a lingering aura of friendliness that permeates the city.

"The British navy has been sighted at Vinga lighthouse! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy!"

One of my favourite spots is the Storängsudd nature preserve at Beatelund on Hisingen. Walking there in the springtime is balm to the soul. The oak woods with the anemones! Cowslip, Elder-flowered Orchid, and not least the Snake's Head Fritillary, county flower of Västergötland. The water and the waterfowl.

The old castle of the Prince-Electors in Gothenburg goes back to 1542. In 1988, the 125th anniversary of the Black Cat was celebrated in the Keiller vineyard. An explanation for the name of this make of wine is given in an old story. Three wine merchants from Skövde couldn't decide which barrel of wine to buy. As the winemaker was pouring them yet another sample glass, his black cat jumped onto one of the barrels, bristling and hissing. The merchants took this to mean that the cat was trying to keep the best wine for his master. And since that day, Black Cat wine is sold in Gothenburg.

There are also many tea plantations in the Gothenburg area where you can observe the entire tea-making craft from the bush to the package. Methods have hardly changed in the past century, and the plantations are still full of pickers carrying baskets on their backs.

"If you're looking for a smoke when you're in Gothenburg – up at Näckrosdammen, Vasaparken or Femmans torg" then you're "Welcome to Gothenburg! To a jinglingly joyful Gothenburg!"

The city has tramways which appear so right-in-place for the old steel-making city. They go PING and scare you half to death, that's good.

I searched most of the city for an internet café. I found one single place. So it has to be the largest city I've ever been to with (virtually) no internet cafés. But who cares? "On a September afternoon you lie down at Allén. You light yourself a little joint and bask in the sun."

When in Gothenburg, you mustn't miss the Temple of the Exquisite Hiding Place. Check out all the Buddhas carved in the cliffs along the stream! Now that Gothenburg municipality has gone back to more traditional values and religion isn't being combated to the same extent any more, you'll see huge building works going on at all the temple compounds.

The taxicabs are entertaining in their way: the supremely illogical zone system, which, instead of using meters, divides the city into payment sectors designed to make the politicians' commute cheap; the disconcerting oddity of multiple customers with multiple destinations, crammed into a single cab; and the eccentricity of the drivers, whose knowledge of the city may be tenuous at best, but whose interest in global politics is often passionate and voluble.

"The bustling docks open their arms to embrace you and gather you to the heart that is Gothenburg!"

Yes indeed, Gothenburg is a great place, a city you never grow tired of. It offers continuous surprises, and still it always make you feel right at home.

If anything in this entry appears confusing or inaccurate, this other entry may perhaps provide an explanation.

[More blog entries about surrealism,, absurdism; surrealism, absurdism.]

Surreal Text Collage

2006-10-14T21:08:00.000+02:00

The organisers of this weekend’s science fiction convention in Stockholm asked me to give a fifteen-minute speech of praise on any theme I liked. I decided to talk about the Swedish city of Gothenburg. I’ve been there only twice for a few days as a grown man, and although I found the city to be nice, I can’t say I know much about it. There is a traditional rivalry between Stockholm and Gothenburg, but I decided not to allude to that at all.

My first idea, the occasion being an sf convention, was to praise a far-future Gothenburg and allow this to be known only gradually through the speech by dropping more and more futuristic hints. Then I had an idea I liked better: since I don’t really know anything about the place, I’d ask people to tell me what they like about Gothenburg, and then appropriate their sentiments for myself. Having done some of this, I decided that I would solicit other people’s praise for any city at all, and then turn all this material into my own praise for Gothenburg and mix it with the authentic Gothenburg appreciations. Some of this city praise I got from the readers of this blog, and then I collected more from the web through a few Google searches. I also stuck in a few snippets of famous song lyrics about Gothenburg. The resulting text contained no opinions of my own, and many opinions not actually about Gothenburg.

To structure the speech, I wrote an intro and an outro, put the snippets I’d collected into an Excel sheet, assigned an automatic random number to each of them and then sorted and re-sorted them on these changing numbers until they were in an order I liked. Then I printed the speech out, took it to the convention and read it out.

I was pleased to find that the audience seemed to like it and laughed a lot, particularly the ones who knew Gothenburg or recognised some of the snippets about other cities that I’d appropriated. So I find this to be a good technique to generate a surreal or psychedelic textual collage. But your mileage may vary: I’d say that science fiction fans probably have an exceptionally robust grip on primary reality, having so much experience with otherworldly or absurd fictional settings. Other people may find such a kaleidoscopic narrative – mixing truth, blatant falsehood and utter irrelevancies – pointless, confusing or even threatening.

A translation of the speech follows in the next blog entry.

[More blog entries about writing, surrealism, absurdism; skriva, surrealism, absurdism.]

But First -- Are You Spiritual?

2006-10-14T10:07:00.000+02:00

I keep coming across the notion, mostly in American writings, that although many people no longer regard themselves as religious, still they stress the importance of spirituality. I have a problem with spirituality. I don't know what it means. And I'm pretty sure nobody else really does either.

Cognate words in Swedish are andlighet, which has strong connotations of the church-going little old lady, and spiritualitet, which means "a humorous way with words" (though less well-read Swedes have begun to use it to denote spirituality in the American non-sense). Spirituality seems to be what younger Swedes mean when they say "I'm not religious, but I do believe in something".

I think the main reason that it's so hard to understand "spirituality" is that it refers to feelings that are impossible to communicate clearly. Each American who professes spirituality very likely means different things, though they will never know that as they can't visit the insides of each other's brains. To explain what they mean, they may cite their feelings when watching the stars, walking in majestic natural scenery or gazing into the eyes of babies. Those things of course awaken profound feelings of something or other* in me too. But what do they have to do with spirits? Concretely speaking, there's no such thing as spirits or souls. There's just brains harbouring thoughts and emotions. Evolution has made sure to equip me with wonderful feelings for babies. It's a good way to help them stay alive until maturity, which is all that evolution really cares about.

So "spirituality" can mean pretty much anything. I'm tentatively translating the word as "undogmatic religion". A good thing about old-school dogmatic religions with carefully worded creeds and rigidly delimited canons of literature is that you know exactly what they expect you to believe. I only need to read the first line of the Nicene Creed to know that I'm not a Christian. But how do I know whether myself or anyobody else is spiritual? Really no way of telling. You can't reasonably contradict me if I say you're murglezoinggg either, as none of us knows what the word means.

Maybe I'm in fact a deeply spiritual man. Or a highly neebzeebluffle one. I guess I'll never know.

* Douglas Adams & John Lloyd. 1983. The Meaning of Liff. "Hambledon (n.). The sound of a single-engined aircraft flying by, heard whilst lying in a summer field in England, which somehow concentrates the silence and sense of space and timelessness and leaves one with a profound feeling of something or other."

[More blog entries about spirituality, religion; andlighet, religion.]

Charming City

2006-10-13T18:16:00.000+02:00

Dear Reader, I have a request for you. Could you please comment on this entry and tell me a few favourite things about any large city you like to visit? For instance the park where you had pretzels, the department store where you helped a drag queen zip up a dress in the back, the cellar where you learned ninjutsu, the tower on a hill where you had tea and watched the sun go down over the sea. I'm going to bake something out of this material for a talk on Saturday 14 October, and then there will be a blog entry.

Update 14 October: Thanks, everyone! I've got lots of great material now. A few hours from now, I'll see what the audience at the ImagiCon sf convention thinks about it. All applied to the Swedish city of Gothenburg...

One-Man Carnival

2006-10-12T20:19:00.000+02:00

I've been thinking vaguely about setting up a blog carnival on archaeology and ancient history. Turns out Alun Salt of Archaeoastronomy already has! Under the headline "Vidi" he periodically lists loads of good entries on these themes with a faint Mediterranean bent. And he's finding all these entries by himself, not through submissions! Go have a look.

Skeptical Voices

2006-10-12T19:25:00.000+02:00

The Skeptics' Circle blog carnival has moved on from here and is currently welcoming visitors at the Inoculated Mind blog. Karl, who runs the blog, did something cool and unusual this time. He asked the contributors to send him voicemail over Skype, so in addition to the standard carnival text there is a podcast where you can hear the contributors, including yours truly, talk about their submissions. Great to hear the voices of these people whose writing I read all the time!

[More blog entries about podcasting, carnivals, skepticism; podcasting, skepsis, skepticism.]

Fifty Years Out Toward Lyra

2006-10-12T18:55:00.000+02:00

The Swedish language has produced very few really good works of science fiction. (Give us a break, Swedish has less than nine million native speakers). One of these few really good works was published 50 years ago, and the occasion was celebrated with a symposium today at the Academy of Letters. It might have been the Swedish Academy, because the book's author was a member and they awarded him the Nobel for it. I'm talking about Harry Martinson's science fiction verse epic Aniara.

The Aniara is an interplanetary spaceship full of colonists bound for Mars, escaping from an Earth ruined by pollution and nuclear fallout. On its way from Earth the spaceship evades an asteroid, gets thrown off course, sustains heavy damage to its steering, and ends up randomly on a course for Lyra. The constellation's stars are so far away that when the Aniara finally arrives there its passengers will have been dead for aeons. In 103 cantos of varying length and lyrical form, Martinson tells stories of the people on board as they progress through the years on their pointless journey into interstellar space.

We came from Earth, from Dorisland,
the jewel in our solar system,
the only orb where life obtained
a land of milk and honey.
Describe the landscapes we found there,
the days their dawn could breed.
Describe the creature fine and fair
who sewed the shrouds for his own seed
till God and Satan hand in hand
through a deranged and poisoned land
took flight uphill and down
from man: a king with ashen crown.

Aniara, canto 79, by Harry Martinson.
Translated by Stephen Klass and Leif Sjöberg 1999.

The book is very much a product of the Cold War: marked by concerns about environmental degradation and the nuclear threat. It is also a pessimistic book, a vision of the futility of human endeavour, very far in tone from what for example Robert Heinlein was writing at the time. But Aniara draws from the same background of sf tropes as Heinlein's books, offering an alternative and cautionary take on what is sometimes called Golden Age sf.

As a child, I used to feel a deep stomach-churning horror at the thought of that crippled spaceship falling away into the darkness. Looking at it now, I'm not so sure the alternatives would have been much better. The people on the Aniara fled a dying Earth to live as colonists on inhospitable Mars. Neither their origins nor their intended destination was Paradise, and so their fall into darkness shouldn't really be seen as a fall from grace. They have food and power to last them for years. They continue to produce cultural fads, religions, even scientific discoveries. Sure, they're all fucked. But they were fucked before they even went aboard the Aniara. And that, I guess, is how the gloomy yet brilliant poet, then just into his 50s, saw life. We're fucked. Nobody gets out of here alive.

Harry Martinson wasn't a glumster all of his life. For youthful vigor, optimism and prose-lyrical mastery, read his early books about life as a sailor in the merchant navy: Resor utan mål (1932) and Kap Farväl (1933).

[More blog entries about books, reading, sf, sciencefiction, sf, poetry, Sweden; böcker, läsning, sciencefiction, sf, poesi, harrymartinson.]

Runes in the Eye of the Beholder

2006-10-11T23:06:00.000+02:00

Back in the very early days of this blog I told you about something cool written by my Danish friend Rud Kjems. Now he's done it again: Rud just published an eminently readable book on the history of investigation of the Runamo pseudo-runes.

In the woods outside the town of Ronneby in the southern Swedish province of Blekinge is a flat cliff with a long striated ribbon across it. Irregularities in the surface of this ribbon look almost as if they might be written characters, why not runes? The site was mentioned in writing already by Saxo in the 12th century, who relates that King Valdemar sent his loremasters to Runamo to read the runes, but that they failed. Famous scholars throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries made repeated attempts at making sense of the thing, and some came up with long interesting readings about ancient kings and battles. Until geology and archaeology matured enough to be able to identify the formation as geology.

A long ancient crack in the bedrock has become filled with a crystalline mineral whose natural structure leads to transverse cracks looking like runes. There are in fact other similar features in the vicinity, all built the same way as the ancient quartz quarry I wrote about the other day. The many learned readings at Runamo through the centuries were just moonshine.

I had the pleasure to read Rud's book in manuscript form, and I'm thrilled to see the typography and the many fine illustrations. This is definitely a book to look out for if you're at all interested in Scandinavian archaeology and history.

Kjems, Rud. 2006. Runamo. Skriften der kom og gik. Forlaget Hikuin. Moesgård. 168 pp. ISBN 87-90814-42-8.

[More blog entries about archaeology, runes, geology, Sweden; arkeologi, runor, geologi, Blekinge.]

Tech Note: Lost My Mac Cherry Today

2006-10-10T19:34:00.000+02:00

Before today, my experience of Macintosh computers was limited to playing games with my friend Tor on a monochrome Plus model in the late 80s. I've been using PCs from the original IBM machine onward. Not religiously, just for practical reasons. And so, this morning when I arrived at my academy office, I found waiting for me two large cardboard boxes. And and an Out Of Box experience of a brand spanking new Macintosh.

It turned out to be a friendly machine. The only thing I didn't manage to do with it was install my standard web links page as desktop wallpaper. (Dear Reader, do please tell me how!) So I got some work done.

But of course there were irritating details. There seems to be no "end" key that sends the cursor to the end of the current line of text. There is a fourth type of shift key that you need to use a lot, as if Windows programs would make heavy use of the flag key in addition to Shift, Ctrl and Alt. The watch is top right instead of bottom right. The CD and DVD drive bays appear boarded up. Most programs defaulted to a really tiny font. But Firefox installed without a hitch, the Airport wireless router was plug and play, and I found Adium to be a decent instant messaging program.

My keyboard moves are getting all muddled. I've been running Open Office for a while on the laptop and my research machine, so I was getting the italics and boldface keys wrong even before I ended up with a Macintosh as well. But it seems my gut feeling about Macintosh vs. Windows was correct: the differences are really negligible for everyday users like myself, nothing to get all fundamentalist about.

[More blog entries about computers, mac, macintosh; datorer, mac, macintosh.]

News From Old Uppsala

2006-10-09T22:09:00.000+02:00

Back in January I blogged about exciting new discoveries at Old Uppsala. Today I visited the place and heard talks by a large number of scholars working on issues related to the site, including Magnus Alkarp and Neil Price who identified the foundations of the wooden church as reported here previously.

Here are the most interesting tidbits that I picked up today.

Geoarchaeologist and palaeoecologist Magnus Hellquist presented bore core studies of sediments from the little vanished lake of Myrby träsk immediately west of the Royal Barrows. It seems that right about the time when the barrows and the longhouse plateaux were built, there's evidence for enormous localised soil erosion and sediment redeposition in the lake.
Alkarp & Price are preparing an on-line gazetteer of interventions into the ground at Old Uppsala, archaeological and otherwise. The model for their project is Martin Carver's work at Sutton Hoo, only they're covering a much larger area. I've done similar work on the Barshalder cemetery on Gotland (covering, among other things, about 45 seasons of fieldwork since 1826). If we're lucky, Alkarp & Price's work may finally lead up to a large-scale excavation campaign at Old Uppsala, the first since the mid-19th century when the Royal Barrows were opened. Dig the mutha, say I!
Lars-Inge Larsson showed some jaw-dropping geophysical survey data from the longhouse plateaux. After less than two days in the field, and without lifting a single turf, he's got the as yet unexcavated foundations of the royal halls and later buildings mapped out in great detail. I've got to get this guy to do my ploughland sites in Östergötland before I start digging there.

[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden; arkeologi, uppsala.]

Podcasting Epiphany

2006-10-08T22:00:00.000+02:00

The other day I belatedly realised why podcasting and video-on-demand will utterly supplant radio, airwave TV and cable TV.

I know that this means that I'm really behind the game here. But anyway, let me explain what it is I've come to understand after more than a year of listening to podcasts.

With the old media distribution channels, the content providers have all the programming on tape, and they decide what tapes you and I can watch, and when. For instance, my son wanted me to deliver him to his mom no later than ten o'clock yesterday because that's when the Cartoon Network offers a certain show that he likes. I snuck out before he was even awake and was chasing tupperware in the woods when the fated hour struck. Poor kid.

With podcasting and video-on-demand, you and I decide what we want to watch/hear, and when. The content providers' tape archives, as it were, are available to us in their entirety whenever we want over broadband. The Swedish State Broadcasting Corporation doesn't have an interviews show about the American counterculture (duh), and even if they did, its broadcasting hours would be very unlikely to fit my schedule. Podcasting is not just a convenient way for me to listen to the R.U. Sirius show: it's the only way I could listen to it. At irregular intervals, when I commute or drive longer distances. It's great. And the files will in all likelihood be instantly available for years and years to come, unlike the many brilliant radio programs that survive at best as dusty rolls of tape in the vaults of broadcasting companies.

So, Dear Reader, if you happen to be even slower than me on the uptake, let me tell you this: FM radio/TV broadcasting and cable TV are technologies of the past. Get your media over broadband. Get whatever you like, whenever you like.

[More blog entries about podcasting, media; podcasting, media.]

Blog Ranking Explained

2006-10-08T09:14:00.000+02:00

Dear Reader, if you're interested in Technorati's blog ranking and link counts, you might want to have a look at this succinct explanation of how they work.

Ranking is based on the number of unique linking blogs in the past six months. This means that a site's ranking can sink dramatically when an isolated flurry of linking in the past moves out of the six-month window. The recent two-carnival boom at Salto sobrius is a case in point. Still, this blog is lined up for more carnivals in the near future. And it's currently ranked number three among archaeology blogs in English worldwide, which tickles me no end.

Comely and Leering

2006-10-06T23:27:00.000+02:00

I've used the same e-mail address since 1995 and published it repeatedly on the web and the Usenet. So I get droves of spam. Mostly I don't have to see it, Thunderbird's spam filter doing a pretty good job. But there's one group of spam messages that are apparently hard to identify as such, and so I have to get rid of them by hand. And that means I have to read their subject lines.

These brief messages are sublime in their abuse of the English language, attempting to entice the recipients to look at porn. Especially the inexplicable choice of adjectives -- somebody's Russian-English dictionary is clearly working overtime. Here are a few gems.

Doo appetising Ladies doingg heavenly blowwjob?
sophisticated Youungest Hussy in fuckingg
cultured Teenies doiing choice blowjobb
dishy Young Eighteen so comely and
Young Teenies so comely and leering!
Do you like squeamish Hussies doing excellent blowjoob?
Do you want advisable virginn Teenie?
prurient Schoolgiirls doing orgiastic suckinng
darling russian squeamish Teenies here!
Young Girls so bonnie and pulchritudinous!
Do you like esthetic Ladies doing subtle blowjobb?
voluptuous Just Ladies and fastidious Bitches from Your dreeam!
Young jolly virrgins at harddcore Poorno
gentle Girls at Porrn!

Dear Reader, are you by any chance a voluptuous Just Lady or sophisticated Youungest Hussy? Are you squeamish, advisable, fastidious and bonnie? Then please tell me, how do you do it? I must ask my wife as well. I'm sure she was once a young jolly virrgin.

Update 7 October: You'll think I'm making this up, but today I received a spam message whose subject line read "Be A Sperm-man With Shitload Of Sperms". Err... yes, quite.

[More blog entries about spam, porn, Russia; spam, porr, Ryssland.]

Quartz Time

2006-10-06T18:37:00.000+02:00

Do you know what's in this picture? Click on it to get a bigger version. Check out the details.

Fredrik Molin sent it to me. He's a field archaeologist and Mesolithic scholar working in Östergötland. Together with Magnus Rolöf and other colleagues, he's excavated a Stone Age quartz quarry at Stjärneberg right outside Linköping.

As mentioned here before, quartz is a tricky material to knap, not at all like flint. You get loads of debris, and your actual products are pretty ugly. But it works, and in much of Scandinavia quartz was the number one tool-making material for millennia.

At Stjärneberg Fredrik and the others have documented a small quarry looking pretty much like it did on the last day that somebody used it. The date of use is still uncertain, and the site may have seen repeated visits for centuries or millennia. But there was a knapping floor nearby displaying a bipolar knapping technique particularly common during the Mesolithic, and post-glacial shoreline displacement sets the earliest possible date for the quarry's use to the Late 7th Millennium BC. This is the date that Fredrik suggests: at the time, the site was at the shore of an island with good access to marine resources. Hopefully, radiocarbon from a nearby hearth will settle the issue.

Molin, Fredrik; Rolöf, Magnus & Wikell, Roger. Manuscript. Mesolithic quartz quarrying in Eastern Middle Sweden in the light of a newly excavated quarry at Stjärneberg, Linköping.

[More blog entries about archaeology, Mesolithic, lithics, Sweden; stenåldern, mesolitikum, stensmide, arkeologi, Östergötland.]