humour
aardvarchaeology | April 29, 2008From UK rapper Elemental, an extremely witty song about tea with a funny video!
Via Paddy K and Brass Goggles.
neurophilosophy | March 30, 2008This track, called Design Coding by The Poetic Prophet, has just been uploaded on YouTube. I thought it was hilarious the first time I saw it, and it's still very amusing on the fourth viewing. I'm not an expert on search engine optimization, but the advice provided here is, as far as I know, accurate.
Here's a transcript of the lyrics:
Your site design is the first thing people see,
It should be reflective of you and the industry,
Easy to look at with a nice navigation,
When they can't find what they want it causes frustration,
A clear call to action to increase the…
aardvarchaeology | March 24, 2008
Bajs-Arne ("Shitty Arnie") is the family cat. Saturday, in a clumsy attempt to check out the view from the kitchen window, he overturned an hibiscus and created an archaeological pottery assemblage. It consists of a complete Swedish 2000s flower pot, a complete Swedish 1940s glazed China soup plate that the pot had been sitting on, and a large sherd of a Chinese 1990s glazed China soup bowl that had been plugging the drain hole in the pot. Shitty Arnie hopes to publish a note on the assemblage in a near-future issue of the Newsletter of the Department of Pottery Technology, University of…
aardvarchaeology | March 13, 2008Lore Sjöberg at Wired celebrates the achievement of recently deceased gaming wizard Gary Gygax with an entertaining look at what it would be like if Dungeons & Dragons characters behaved like archaeologists.
May 16
We have nearly finished our initial survey of the outer flagstones of the dungeon entrance. Already we have made wonderful discoveries! Initial tests indicate that the stones may have come from an open pit quarry near the Elonges River, nearly two miles from here! Also, we were attacked by a Phantom Fungus and lost two more graduate students.
Thanks to Johan Lundström for the…
aardvarchaeology | February 26, 2008Dear potential academic employers,
I know you are all secretely competing for who will have the pleasure of giving me a forskarassistent assistant professor's position, to see me fire the imaginations of a new generation of students, to see me produce awesome research in great quantities and present a charming face for your department toward the media and the public.
I know you've just been joking with me for the past four years, receiving my job applications and saying, with a merry twinkle in your little eyes, "Oh no, the loveable little rascal may have 115 published pieces of work and the…
aardvarchaeology | February 22, 2008
I'm a big fan of Danish archaeology. In my opinion it is the best in Scandinavia, both regarding the sites they have and what they write about them. This love of Danish archaeology has been a strong incentive for me to learn to read Danish easily, though I still have a very hard time understanding it when spoken. (Rumour has it that Danish babies learn to speak on average several months later than other European ones, simply because it's so hard to discern any words in their parents' fond gurglings.)
Swedish and Danish aren't really separate languages in the sense that e.g. French and German…
neurophilosophy | February 16, 2008
The great filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock had a profound insight into the workings of the human mind. "There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it," he once said, and the shower scene from Psycho, demonstrates this perfectly.
This scene is one of the most shocking ever filmed. Yet, it does not include any shots of the knife penetrating the flesh of Janet Leigh's character, and the only hint of blood comes right at the end, when it flows into the plughole.
The Mad Mother Psychoshower Curtain above is available from PrankPlace.com, and costs $24.99.
aardvarchaeology | February 6, 2008
As chronicled here in many entries over the past months, computer consultant, New Age author and homeopath Bob G. Lind has carved out his own niche in Swedish amateur archaeology with controversial interpretations of Scanian archaeological sites Ales stenar and Höga stenar. Another Bob Lind is a famous US folk singer. Yet now I've learned that Bob G. Lind is a singer and a song-writer too!
My Malmö colleague Ingela Kishonti has kindly sent me scans of the cover and labels of a 45-rpm vinyl single that Bob G. put out in 1978 on NCB/K.M.C. Records. (This does not appear to have been be the…
aardvarchaeology | February 1, 2008One evening last week in North Carolina, walking back from Chapel Hill to the Holiday Inn along road 54, I heard this brilliant send-up of everything Barry White ever recorded on the radio. Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you "Business Time" with Flight of the Conchords, live on stage!
illconsidered | January 9, 2008Via my father I came across this anonymously authored modern day parable, which I think is a good analogue for the economic growth vs sustainability argument:
An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican
village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the
small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American
complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how
long it took to catch them.
The Mexican replied "only a little while".
The American then asked why didn't he stay out longer and catch more
fish.
The Mexican said he had…
aardvarchaeology | January 6, 2008Field archaeology has its perks, one of which is the interaction with the public. Most site visitors are simply full of polite interest. A few tend to be local patriots who wish to reaffirm that their neck of the woods was once enormously important. And then there are those who, well, possess more curiosity than knowledge, shall we say.
A colleague at the Stockholm Town Museum told me a story about this latter group. He was digging in the Old Town once, when a person approached his trench and looked intently at his spoil dumps. After a while this person stooped and picked a small stone out of…
aardvarchaeology | December 22, 2007Scandy readers will be very familiar with this. As we learned from "Hatten Är Din", "Ansiktsburk", "Fiskpinnar" and other Turk Hits back in 2000, you can get wonderfully absurd results if you listen to a song in a foreign language and pretend it's actually sung in your mother tongue.
Now, a talented Ansiktsburk poet has subtitled, in English, a typically over-the-top music video from southern India. Unbelievable stuff!
"Have you been high today?
I see the nuns are gay
My brother yelled to me
'I love you inside Ed!'"
sb admin | December 18, 2007 The Onion shares news of a drug designed to alleviate distrust of drug manufacturers.
"Out of a test group of 180, 172 study participants reported a dramatic rise in their passion for pharmaceutical companies," said Pfizer director of clinical research Suzanne Frost. "And 167 asked their doctors about a variety of prescription medications they had seen on TV."
Frost said a small percentage of test subjects showed an interest in becoming lobbyists for one of the top five pharmaceutical companies, and several browsed eBay for drug-company apparel.
PharmAmorin, available in 100-, 200-, and 400-…
aardvarchaeology | December 17, 2007
Johan Jönsson of Månskensdans has identified a lookalike of my future self: German musical singer Jerzy Jeske, "Multitalent und Darsteller bei mehr als 40 Premieren in 5 Sprachen". Go Jerzy!
There's also a British actor who looks like I do currently, but I've forgotten his name. I think he was in a TV adaptation of the life of Tsarevna Catherine the Great, but I can't seem to find him in IMDB.
aardvarchaeology | December 14, 2007This is really great. Everybody else has realised that Bob Lind's new "discovery" was a canard. But today, local paper Ystad Allehanda's credulous reporter nevertheless conveys the man's ideas that
Standing stones are unlikely to mark cemeteries. (They are in fact enormously common in early-to-mid-1st Millennium AD cemeteries in Sweden.)
Many of the stones in the new cemetery Lind has been spinning his astronomical yarns about hardly protrude above the turf. The reason, he says, is that the ground level in the meadow has somehow risen 80 cm since the stones were put in place, and nearly…
sb admin | December 14, 2007In a parody of Make Magazine projects, Austrian group Monochrom demonstrate how to create a brain computer interface, a.k.a. braicin, using household materials like duct tape, old ice skates, a vintage calculator, and onions in alcohol ("preferably Romanian"). Via Boing Boing TV. Link to extended director's uncut version (shown here).
aardvarchaeology | December 8, 2007
Bob Lind chalking some apparently quite genuine cupmarks, a ubiquitous type of Bronze Age rock art.
Alternative archaeoastronomer Bob Lind (note that I do not call him an unhinged man with crackpot theories) felt himself vindicated this past summer by the Swedish Heritage Board. On a set of new visitors' signs, the Board didn't actually endorse Lind's alternative interpretation of the stone ship of Ales stenar, but the signs recounted his ideas alongside the scholarly consensus interpretation without taking a stand on the issue. This was enough to make Lind a very happy man.
Now, local…
sb admin | November 30, 2007Anaesthetist's Hymn performed by the comedy duo Amateur Transplants, set to the music of Total Eclipse of the Heart.
[P.S. What's this got to do with the brain? Consciousness.]
aardvarchaeology | November 17, 2007Archaeologists have an extremely strange worldview. We never simply see what's going on around us right now: we keep thinking about what a place would have looked like hundreds of years ago, or what it will look like in the far future. The Onion has a great piece on-line about just that: "Crime Scene Investigators Find Arrowhead".
"Their bodies showed signs of blunt force trauma to the head, as well as several postmortem stab wounds, although no indications of sexual abuse were present. A steel pipe bearing human blood and tissue matter was found at the scene but did not appear to be related…