November Pieces Of My Mind #3

Irish trad session at Wirström's pub in Stockholm's Old Town Irish trad session at Wirström's pub in Stockholm's Old Town
  • One of the most annoying and amateurish things a graphic designer can do, in my experience, is to insert hard hyphens.
  • I make a policy of keeping conservative and libertarian people in my Facebook feed and not muting them even though I don't agree with them. But lately I've had to add a subclause: I'm only keeping the smarter, better-reasoning ones. Because really, it's just unproductive for everyone if I allow my image of my political opponents to get skewed by the stupidest and angriest members of their camp.
  • A lot of people let Muslim refugees stay in their spare rooms right now. We can't do that because we've got a Muslim bartender staying in ours while he has his Östermalm bachelor pad refurbished. He's always here a lot for game night anyway.
  • Wife frying dried cuttlefish strips. A heavy cloud of unwashed crotch permeates our house.
  • The timer on the tree lights covering our little lilac tree sounds just like a defragging hard disk.
  • Woah. I just checked the competition for this job in a neighbouring country. The competitor with the largest number of publications in their national library has 7 titles there. I have 18. In their national library.
  • Can we just agree that "materiality" is a useless buzzword in archaeology and move on?
  • I want to make sacrifice to Odinn. Or pray to Saint Lawrence. But since I was born in Sweden after the Reformation, I can't really. It would be diachronic cultural appropriation.
  • Author submits image with too few pixels. Argues that since it was clipped from a 300 dpi photo it should work just fine.
  • Hehe. Sinéad O'Connor's cover of "Song To The Siren" copies the melodic ornaments of the TMC/Cocteau cover, with lyrics clearly mistranscribed from that version.
  • Jrette grumbling about Adele Adkins's vocal range, which makes her songs difficult.
  • The latest episode of Radiolab is amazing. Deals with international surrogate parenthood, ”baby outsourcing”. It’s got terrified Israeli gay men running around Katmandu during the earthquake clutching their infant sons and daughters. It’s got interviews with housemaids from Darjeeling conducted in the house where they stay with their kids during their surrogate pregnancies. It’s a jaw-dropper!
  • Yesterday the Swedish government came out and said "We can't receive more asylum seekers to a standard that we can accept". I'm more interested in whether we can receive more asylum seekers to a standard that they can accept, that is, one that is preferable to getting tortured and killed by the Daesh.
  • This scholar publishes papers in Swedish, then tries to list them in later bibliographies with titles in English "because they have English summaries".
  • "Candle" is bougie in French. This goes back to the town of Béjaïa in Algeria which was a centre of wax production and candle making in the Middle Ages.
  • In Medieval Stockholm, butchers lived on the west side of the town island towards Lake Mälaren with its rich farming districts. Fishermen lived on the seaward east side.
  • Driving four refugees last night to accommodation provided by a temperance lodge in Häggvik, I got directions from one of the guys who had satnav in his phone. It gave directions in Arabic and he gesticulated.
  • Went out scouting the forgotten strips of municipal property in the area my dad lives in. Discovered two types: disused unpaved streets (now largely paths) and post-borne power lines. The latter are used as free parking spaces for cars and boat trailers.
  • If you donate at least SEK 300 to the World Wildlife Fund right now, they'll send you a cuddly turtle. I'm donating SEK 299 to avoid this. I wish they'd stop sending me a bloody book every year too.
  • A music journalist on Little Atoms last week exemplified those who don't care much about music with "people who will just buy Adele CDs". I was a little hurt. I'm a big music nerd and care lots, and I think Adele is really impressive.
  • I'm walking in this pro-refugee protest behind the banner of Revolutionary Communist Youth, despite being neither.
  • Jrette exclaimed "PNYEAH". I decided that it was a freedom of speech issue and did not investigate. Or it may have been a sneeze.

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This scholar publishes papers in Swedish, then tries to list them in later bibliographies with titles in English “because they have English summaries”.

In my field, you are actually allowed to do this if the paper was published in a language that doesn't use a Latin-derived alphabet, although you are supposed to specify the original language of publication. (In practice, most of the Russian/Soviet journals of interest in my field have English translation versions, which Western authors usually cite instead of the Russian version.) But if the paper was published in a language with Latin-based characters, you are supposed to provide the title in that language. So if a Swedish scientist were to publish in his native language, he (and anybody else who read it) would have to use the Swedish title when citing it. I have occasionally cited papers written in German, and I always use the German titles for those papers.

Of course the rules may be different for your field, but it's definitely not kosher for this guy to imply that he wrote the papers in English when only the summary is in that language.

By Eric Lund (not verified) on 30 Nov 2015 #permalink

Signe has learned one of life's hard lessons - that very few people are born with Adele's extraordinary vocal power, range and ability to sing in tune. People who don't know that are tone deaf, at least to some extent.

By John Massey (not verified) on 30 Nov 2015 #permalink

Head of Senate environment committee. Oh US, where are you headed?

Rapidly up Shit Creek, from the look of things.

By John Massey (not verified) on 04 Dec 2015 #permalink

More news from Britain:
-Zuckerberg regrets going on Facebook while drunk
-Liverpool fans braced for months of futile optimism
Corbyn sullies the memory of Blair http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2015/12/03/corbyn-sullies-the-memory-of-blai…
UKIP leader Nigel Farage: “I am popular and handsome”
Osborne mistakes himself for WWE wrestler
Forth Bridge pissed http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/environment/forth-bridge-pissed-2015…
THE Forth Road Bridge has been closed after engineers discovered it was well over the safe alcohol limit, it has emerged. Engineer Bill McKay said: “We’d noticed it visibly swaying, but we thought that was because of high winds.
"-Wi-Fi signals can interfere with prayer, warns Church of England

By Birgerjohansson (not verified) on 04 Dec 2015 #permalink

Icelanders flock to religion revering Sumerian gods and tax rebates http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/08/new-icelandic-religion-sum… Didn’t Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd do the Sumerian god thing already?
-- -- -- -- --
(Overcast sky brings nit-picking mood).
BTW, isn’t “count” a rather minor feudal title? So how did Count Dooku muster the resources needed to threaten the whole Republic?
And when will the Empire invent armour suits that are actually, you know, F*CKING BULLETPROOF?!!!

By birgerjohansson (not verified) on 08 Dec 2015 #permalink

Birger@13: Imperial Stormtrooper armor is bulletproof. It has to be: there's a reason the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy is a trope. The problem is that it's useless against rebels with frickin' laser beams (to say nothing of lightsabers).

By Eric Lund (not verified) on 08 Dec 2015 #permalink

For Swedish-language boardgame enthusiasts: There are now two books out describing the boardgame culture of the 1980s and -90s: "Finna dolda ting" and "Äventyrsspel".
This is the culture that made elderly journalists worry about brainwashing and satanism!

By birgerjohansson (not verified) on 09 Dec 2015 #permalink

England has been getting so much rain lately, they had to get help from the army:
http://satwcomic.com/force-was-needed
Trump claims Islam ‘fucked up his hair’
You’re not even in our top five worries, Londoners tell extremists

By Birgerjohansson (not verified) on 09 Dec 2015 #permalink