Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It’s chilly here in North Dakotaland with the first “hard frosts” of the season turning the spongy ground into a wintery crunch. The chilly weather is making it just a bit harder to get out of bed in the morning to make the hard slog down to the comfy chair by the fire and the work blanket and the first cup of coffee. I’m almost looking forward to another winter.

This weekend has plenty to keep us warm from the big Alvarez-Kovalev fight to the Formula 1 boys on U.S. soil. There’s also NFL, NBA, some college footballing to enjoy. Out here at least, we have the last of the leaves to attend, a few good books that are sitting barely touched, a book to finish, and a bunch of little tasks that need doing.

It should be a good weekend, filled with left-over Halloween candy, and to share my bounty, here are so quick hits and varia:

• Archaeology and Jihad.

• Pompeii and Tourism.

• The Alpheios Project.

• The Conquistadors and The Catawba in Appalachia.

• How to return a tribal item.

• Carlos Ginzburg: the possibility of the unexpected.

• Werner Herzog: the outer fringes of our language.

• A guide to Sun Ra albums on Bandcamp.

• On Comic Sans.

• Pesky Possessives. 

• Dive Watches.

• What I’m reading: Greg Anderson, The realness of things past : ancient Greece and ontological history. Oxford 2018. (Take 2. I started it last week and then got to stressed out to even deal with it…)

• What I’m listening to: Sun Ra and his Myth Science Orchestra, When Angels Speak of Love.