If this is Friday, it must be Sweden

So here I am. Missing Peter (inevitable), enjoying the weather (hot, sunny, a touch humid), and working (also inevitable: Vasa is going to have to wait for the next trip, I'm afraid).

The eclipse passed without notice in most parts of the city, I think. (But at only -- what, 30%-ish totality? -- this is forgivable. I think I noticed things getting a little dim this morning, but there was some cloud cover passing through at the time, and people no doubt attributed the change of lighting to that.)

Meanwhile I am holed up in a comfortable bar/restaurant called the Järntorgs Pumpen, finishing work on the film outline and watching other, more normal people sitting out in the sun in front of the restaurant and enjoying themselves. Having had a nice cool tuna salad, I then started a cyberskulk (i.e., a hunt for powerpoints / outlets) and was delighted to find outlets to charge up both computer and cellphone just a table away. (Future visitors, NB: it’s the table for four inside the window on the left as you face the restaurant from the square: the outlets are between the table and the front door.)

Here’s the view from where I’m working:

 ...And now back to work.

(Dublin readers: imagine my surprise to find a bar/restaurant called “The Temple Bar” just around the corner. To my surprise, the menu was mostly Greek. Go figure.)

In the "There is nothing new under the sun" dep't

Like you didn’t already suspect this:

In an Anglo-Saxon book of poetry kept at Exeter Cathedral, researchers from Britain's Wolverhampton University have unearthed a joke that suggests the clichéd ribaldry of a millennium ago is awfully similar to what passes for humor today. The translation, as cited by the Telegraph, reads: "What hangs at a man's thigh and wants to poke the hole that it's often poked before? Answer: A key."

Hur hur hur hur!  (wheeze)

And they have found evidence of Egyptians laughing at similar versions of wit. Researchers at Wolverhampton say the jokes they have found in delicate manuscripts and carved on stone tablets thousands of years old demonstrate a common idea of what's funny across the ages of humanity: flatulence, sex and "stupid people," as one academic tells the Telegraph.

So when the Doctor tells you that the only thing he can depend on on Earth is human nature… better believe him. 

 

Something else to get paranoid about

Gaah.

Tags: computer, detention, laptop, examination, gaah, paranoia, government

Truly, I love Ebert

And how not, when he writes stuff like this?

Moviegoers who knowingly buy a ticket for "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor" are going to get exactly what they expect: There is a mummy, a tomb, a dragon and an emperor. And the movie about them is all that it could be. If you think "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor" sounds like a waste of time, don't waste yours.

I, as it happens, have time to waste and cannot do better than to quote from my review of The Mummy (1999): "There is hardly a thing I can say in its favor, except that I was cheered by nearly every minute of it. I cannot argue for the script, the direction, the acting or even the mummy, but I can say that I was not bored and sometimes I was unreasonably pleased. There is a little immaturity stuck away in the crannies of even the most judicious of us, and we should treasure it."

Go Roger! Go Roger! Go Roger! Go Roger! (etc)

Tags: Roger+Ebert, film, review, Mummy, Dragon, Emperor, Tomb