Friday Varia and Quick Hits

The good news is that a few inches of snow this week gave everything a nice tidy-up, and it looks like we’ll be spared more snow over the weekend. The bad news is hat the next week or so will be the kind of North Dakota seasonal cold that gets into your bones.

Fortunately, it’s Super Bowl weekend and my Eagles are in the Big Game which is exciting and somewhat stressful. In many ways it is the opposite of the second test in the Sri Lanka-Australia series which is both “not a development tour” and features three players with fewer then three tests on their resume (and not the exciting opener Sam Konstas for “reasons”). Anyway, Australia is winning. Saturday offers Derek Chisora’s final fight in the UK against Otto Wallin. If you don’t love Derek Chisora, you don’t love boxing. Finally, the Sixers play Detroit tonight in a game that should be entertaining (or it won’t be and that’ll be par for the season).

This weekend will be exciting, but it won’t be quite as exciting as next week’s New Book Day. If you want a sneak peek at it, you can go here.

Unfortunately this was a hectic week for me. As a result, all I can offer is this anemic list of quick hits and varia:

• Pasts Imperfect.

• Early Byzantine Philippi. 

• Sarah Bond’s new book: Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire.

• Animal History.

• Reduce, reuse, recycle? The clay of the Pylos tablets.

• Rebecca Solnit’s Meditations in an Emergency.

• A Roman Historian in the DOGE House.

• Sun Ra Times Two.

• The Destructive Character.

• Aerial photographs of the Reich Aviation Ministry (WWII Era German Aerial Photos from Greece).

• A Steel Patek Phillipe 1518 Has Hit The Market.

• What I’m reading: A. Venovcevs, “Vestiges of a Previous Industrial Age: A Contemporary Archaeology of Twentieth Century Single Industrial Mining Regions in the Far North.” PhD Dissertation UiT Norges arktiske universitet. 2023.

• What I’m listening to: James Brandon Lewis, Apple Cores (2025).