Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It’s a rainy Fall Friday, and it just feels right. I have an immeasurable stack of grading, writing, and reading to do this weekend, but I am also looking forward to the cooler temperatures of a proper fall. 

Plus, there’s plenty of fall entertainment on tap. Penn State facing Iowa in a make-or-break game for both teams. The Formula 1 guys are back in Istanbul for a second year in a row (and Sainz and Hamilton will be starting from well down the grid with engine penalties). The NASCAR crew is at the Roval in Charlotte. Most importantly, though, Deontay Wilder and Tyson Fury meet for the third time with the WBC, Ring, and Lineal heavyweight championship in the line. Fury is favored (-270) and I suspect he’ll take care of business in six or seven rounds.

Even if the perfect blend of sport and work isn’t to your taste, do check out these quick hits and varia:

• Want the best list of quick hits and varia? Check out Past Imperfects!

• Twilight of the Gods: Greek Cult Places and the Transition to Late Antiquity.

• Byzantine warrior with gold-threaded jaw unearthed in Greece.

• The Byzantine City from Heraclius to the Fourth Crusade, 610–1204.

• Iron Age Greece job at Cincinnati.

• Why the Hell We Are Obsessed with Hell.

• Did Aliens Build the Pyramids? And Other Racist Theories.

• Plaster Casts.

• That Robby Hobby.

• ‘Trying to Hear with the Eyes’: Slow Looking and Ontological Difference in Archaeological Object Analysis.

• Racialized Commodities: Thinking about Trade, Mobility, and Race in the Archaic Mediterranean.

• The Academy after COVID.

• Abdulrazak Gurnah wins the 2021 Nobel prize in literature.

• RIP Dr. Lonnie Smith.

• The Baltic Micro-Rotor.

• MC Audiotech Forty-10 Loudspeakers.

• What I’m reading: Gavin Lucas, Making Time: The Archaeology of Time Revisted. 2021.

• What I’m listening to: Dr. Lonnie Smith, Life at the Club Mozambique.