Turbo Kid — see this movie! Encouraged by my first film festival last year, I’ve signed up for two this year. This past week it’s been the genre festival Monsters of Film, which leans towards horror but has a lot of other stuff too (but very few monster flicks, actually). I saw 5½ films in five days. Two get my special recommendation: Turbo Kid. Fun...

Birger Jarlsgatan 11, Stockholm Nice ad here on my blog for once. It does have a pretty woman in it, but she’s not a white Russian mail-order girlfriend. She’s a black potential student on the course “Swedish for programmers”. Movie: Taikon. Documentary about Swedish novelist and Roma activist Katarina Taikon. Grade: Pass With Distinction. The guy who...

The new version of a slab from the Kivik cairn. Fornvännen 2015:1 is now on-line on Open Access. Sven Sandström on fake Paleolithic art in France. Andreas Toreld and Tommy Andersson on sensational new discoveries on the carved slabs of the Kivik burial cairn. They’ve been endlessly discussed for over 200 years, and now the whole game just changes. Birgit...

Satanic Men At Work in Umeå. (Actually, there’s condensation on the other side of the sign, and the sun is boiling it off.) Me: “subject”. Autocorrect: “Sibbertoft”. Hey everyone who names your daughters “Chatarina”! I just want you to know that you’re stamping your kid with this big label that says “From A Home With No Language Skills”. It’s like naming...

Sweden’s largest and oldest contract archaeology organisation with five units spread across the country is known as ”UV”. This is an old in-house abbreviation that means either uppdragsverksamheten or undersökningsverksamheten, “the contract section” or “the investigation section”. After more than half a century as part of the National Heritage Board,...

In the past couple of months Sweden has started to receive large numbers of refugees from Syria, Iraq and a few other war-torn Middle-eastern countries. The ones who claim the right of political asylum are adequately cared for by the immigration authorities. But many don’t claim that right. They may have more or less accurate information about other...