A few thoughts on the Griffin Warrior Tomb, Pylos. A modest proposal.

There comes a time for saying some things, even if we're saying things we can't really claim to be qualified to say things about. What follows is a series of ramblings and jumbled thoughts. None of this is based on any insider information, because I have none. These are just some ideas that won't stop bothering me, so for the first time in a while I have to get them out there. I'll welcome your comments in the section below, if that's still a thing. So here I go.

The "Griffin Warrior" of NYT and Smithsonian and many other news outlets fame - and of Cincinnati excavation fame - is no Mycenaean. As many of you may have suspected, this guy is a Minoan, cut down in his prime, smack in the middle of the Cretan conquest of the Greek Mainland. We'll say he died of fatigue. The important thing here is that he's bringing Minoan material culture to Pylos and its region BEFORE the Mycenaean conquest of Crete, at a time when the Minoans still appear to have been in cultural if not military ascendency [note, I'm going to have to revise this, see post-script, below]. The fact that he got out and started his Princedom (RIP) here in Pylos just in time is hugely fortuitous, for us and for the rest of history. Despite his low literacy (assumed), he still managed to bring enough images and symbols along on his globetrotting adventure to make it quite clear that he knew his way around his world. The recently-unveiled agate sealstone showing some warrior (him) slaughtering his tartan-clad foes cannot be anything other than a clear indication of how, in an earlier outing, he slashed his way through the Scottish Highlands [to be clear, this is a joke]. But that's a novel for another time. The important thing here is that the guy depicted defeating his adversaries (whoever any of them is supposed to be) is very much in line with what we expect of an aristocratic Minoan, and at this stage at least, nothing like what we'd expect to see from a Mycenaean. This guy could have jumped straight off the seal of the Ruler of Chania, or out of the Prince of the Lillies fresco (less ideal) or, most tellingly, straight out of the scenes depicted on the frescoes at Akrotiri (you can find those for yourself, it's an exhausting task). I know, I know, the Ruler/Master of Chania impression could be post-conquest, but in my view the thing was probably fired in the destruction and thence added to the post-conquest rubble, rather than made, fired, and deposited in the immediate post-conquest phase.

The excavators have already suggested the people of the Griffin Warrior's world were doing a lot of Minoan-style things (dress and buildings are mentioned in the media), but at this stage I'm pretty sure there's still a general consensus as to the "Mycenaean" identity of the individual. I'd like to imagine this is purely for geographic reasons - he's buried on the mainland, and he is therefore Mycenaean merely as a shorthand and not for any other reason. I won't hazard any guesses as to what languages he spoke, nor do I think it's productive at this stage to think about what he might have called himself. But it is abundantly clear from his material culture set that he's hanging out with Minoans, he has access to a huge quantity of stuff made by Minoans (or, to be more objective, stuff made in workshops that normally supply the Minoan elite with certain of their luxury goods), and he has beautiful hair, of which he may have been quite proud (as implied by his combs, his mirror, and of course the exquisitely-carved sealstone). I am not aware of any direct parallels to the depiction on the sealstone, even from the Shaft Graves at Mycenae, which should be seen as roughly contemporaneous or even slightly earlier. The cushion seal from Shaft Grave IV (I think) may come closest, but the technical rendering isn't in the same league, maybe not even the same planet (cough cough). I am not aware of any other "Mycenean" parallels that are particularly compelling from this period - the warrior signet ring from Shaft Grave IV is strikingly dissimilar, and the "Quiet" Vapheio Cup, which does bear strong similarities, is by nearly every standard a Minoan import to the Mycenaean mainland (even if the "Violent" cup is a local product, as has been argued by Ellen Davis in a manner perfectly appropriate to the date of publication).

It's probably not a particularly surprising hypothesis (from a non-expert), given that these Mycenaeans and Minoans were pretty similar genetically (and here, also from a statistically miniscule sampling). I don't know my genetic analysis well enough to determine whether my theory that some Minoans migrating north might have contributed to the amalgamation of a new elite Mycenaean class that then mixed with the rest of the population and turned on its southern neighbors, but the idea makes a kind of sense to me. Certainly, these genetic studies do away with the old and nonsensical idea that the Myceaneans came raging out of the mountains into Greece and then conquered the Aegean and imposed a new bloodline on the world. But the possibility that a few such Northerners came to visit around the time the Griffin Warrior was also bashing heads around Pylos might help to explain the peculiarities (perceived) of the emergent Mycenaean genome.

Anyway, this is something I've been thinking about ever since the amazingly-awesome story first hit the headlines, and I have no more supporting evidence than I did initially. But some of the pieces seem to fit. I also start to feel as if there are some interesting tie-ins to the peculiarly Pylian (?) Mycenaean palace and structures (much later) to go with the semi-Minoan origins of the Griffin Warrior. Since we're being a bit loose with our data here, an anachronistic proposal is hereby proffered: the Griffin Warrior is nothing less than a younger brother of King Minos (let's call this guy proto-Theseus), banished from his homeland due to a good Medieval-style inheritance system. The Griffin Warrior takes his trusty band of comrades to make his way in the world, and upon arriving in Pylos realizes that this place is amazing. Having carefully conquered some of the region for his band, he kicks the bucket. But not before planting some seeds of resentment against his brother and the Minoan Civilization. That resentment would build in his descendants, even as somewhat friendly relations were maintained with the Minoan metropoleis (yes, I said that). Eventually, the technological and economic scales tilted in favor of the Mainlanders, who orchestrated a bloody conquest of Minoan Crete, placing their own hero (we'll say this is the Griffin Warrior's grandson) on the newly-installed throne at Knossos, flanked as he should be by those heraldic griffins.

Update March 8: I've now read Stocker and Davis 2017 on the "Combat Agate" (in Hesperia 86, pp. 583-605) very carefully, and I don't think it pushes me away from any of my initial impressions (in a couple cases they've anticipated some of what I've written above). So that's a good sign. They've also indicated that a forthcoming publication outlines the evidence for the LHII chronology of the burial, which I'm very interested to see. It seems we may be a couple generations after Grave Circle A at Mycenae, but there are all sorts of complexities with that evidence, so I'm reserving judgement.

My Postscript:

Following the LHII chronology proposed (and eventually to be published), I'm going to radically revise everything we know about the Trojan War and its later accounts. Knossos IS Troy, the Griffin Warrior IS Aeneas. See, what happened was the Mycenaeans in LHIB or LHII early besieged Crete, and after 10 years (or a long time, anyway), the other palaces all fell (this is what Homer's Greeks were doing all throughout the Epic Cycle, laying waste to cities around Troy and elsewhere) and, eventually, Knossos capitulated - a Horse easily defeats a Bull in some circumstances. Our Griffin Warrior friend gathered up his belongings and some of his family, escaping burning Troy (=Knossos) just in time. He headed for mainland Greece, where he has some distant cousins or uncles or something, and when he arrived at Sandy Pylos he decided to settle in, along with a trusty band of Minoans. These people were eventually absorbed into the broader Mycenaean network (out of expediency or maybe through a series of badly-arranged marriages and treaties), hence the huge Linear B archive from the palace's later phases. Back at Knossos, c. 1450 BC, some of the cleverer aristocrats (not in the royal line) showed their Mycenaean conquerors how to keep records of the things brought into the palace using a really cool script, and the Mycenaeans enlisted the assistance of Proto-Homer for the creation of a new syllabic script more in line with their value set, Linear B. They used this in the place of Linear A for a time, then sent copies of the new syllabary back to mainland Greece, where other tax-men started using the same conventions.

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June 22, 2013

Even though Google will be stealing as much of our personal information as possible from this next posting, I still thought it might be interesting for some of the anonymous people of the internet to have a look at what we’re up to these days. So here’s some of what has happened since last I wrote:

We had a baby.

We’ve been trained somewhat in the parenting arts.

We’ve met lots of people and traveled all over the place.

We’ve sold and bought a car.

We’ve packed up everything we owned and sent it off to the other side of the planet – the long way around, apparently.

We’ve moved to New Zealand.

It’s not a comprehensive list, but those are the bullet points. The first item is easily the most exciting one, our little guy is amazing and cute and hilarious and of course the best looking and most intelligent boy anyone has ever had. I won’t go on and on, he gets embarrassed easily.

I can’t go into all of this one: we pretty much knew everything about parenting before our son was born, but constant practice has refined our techniques such that we’re now the idiots giving people unsolicited advice about how to care for their children. Feels pretty good knowing it all.

We have been to a few different places over the past year, some of them closer to some places than to other places. For example, our trip to Seattle took us closer to California than did our trip to New York Citeh. Our trip to Mexico had us closer to El Salvador than did our trip to Wisconsin. Our visit to Portugal had us closer to Italy than did our trip to Cincinnati. You get the picture. Now that we’re in New Zealand, I guess that puts us closer to Australia than we were when we visited Brasil that one time. So it all makes a kind of sense.

Selling a car to a private party in the US is relatively simple. All you have to do is find a complete stranger who is extremely trustworthy and honest, and who is willing to pay the asking price on your vehicle. Then all you have to do is fill out all the paperwork, collect legitimate payment, deposit said payment in your account, and hand over all the documents and the keys. Easy as pie. I never made pie, though, that was really Grant’s thing. So if you can avoid it, don’t sell your car. It might be easier to wrap it around a tree and let the insurance company sort it out. Just more dangerous and (maybe) more stupid. Buying a car in another country is even easier than selling one in the US. All you have to do is give someone a whole huge stack of cash and they’ll take care of the rest. Assuming you’re buying it from a legitimate authorized dealer. Otherwise, I’m not sure how to do it. In New Zealand, all cars are valued at about 150% of what they would get in the US. So, for example, a 2004 Corolla with relatively low kilometers will set you back about $10,700 NZ. That’s outrageous. But, for some inexplicable reason, you can score a 2012 Daihatsu Sirion for about the same price, with almost no kms and a valid Toyota-backed factory warranty. I’d go for the latter, even if it does mean driving a cherry red tiny car for the next hundred years or so. Incidentally, our new car is almost exactly the same age as our son.

We didn’t actually pack up most of our things, someone else did that for us. Somehow the container that they loaded for us is going by train to NYC from Chicago, then it’s being loaded onto a ship and sent around the world. I can’t figure out if it’s going through the Suez or the Panama or the Straits or where or how. But in mid-/late-August we’ll have a container in port. I suppose that Customs will want to dig through the whole thing, because it has been packed so neatly, and then eventually it will be delivered to us wherever we’re living at that time. More paperwork awaits.

I don’t think we would have moved, if we had to pack ourselves. Even packing our four suitcases and all the necessities for the 12 week containerless period was almost too much for us. But that brings me to United Airlines. There are good things and bad things. The good things include their willingness to somehow allow us more checked items by two than they should have, and to charge us literally nothing for our checked baggage. We were expecting to pay $100 or $200, that was the way we packed. So that was nice. Not so good? What the complete morons in Houston did to my guitar case in the 3 minutes it was in their care. I cannot express the horror I felt at picking up my never-before-used-outside-the-house guitar case to see the corners scuffed and damaged as they now are. When we have a bit more time, I’ll send the pictures to our friends at United and hope the oafish imbeciles handling luggage at that particular gate get their proper chastisement. But I’ll assume nothing happens. Because that’s to be expected when you pass your valuables over to stupid people against your will. So the United people have good and bad qualities, like all of us, I suppose.

So that’s about it. It has rained/sleeted pretty much ever since we arrived, but that’s what we were expecting, so nobody’s terribly disappointed. The advantage of arriving in winter is that we get to see just where the sun might actually hit houses while we’re checking around to the various neighborhoods around campus. We also get a very clear sense of just how warm the houses are (not at all, thus far). Rent is so high that a person with slightly more impetuousity (that’s a new word for you) might buy a house for roughly the same amount as he’s looking at spending on a rental. But these people aren’t that kind of a person, so they’ll be renting, I suppose.

That’s all I have to say about all of that. What do you think of that, Google? Any good data you can sell to the highest bidder? What sorts of targeted ads will you pop into my email now? I’ll try to up some pix too, to keep even the visual learners entertained.

My blog is on hiatus

In fact, I had a bunch of great ideas to write, all devised on a long bike ride a couple days ago. However, due to the new GOOGLE privacy policy, I am no longer comfortable sharing even this limited information with the world. So, until further notice - by which I mean, "until google figures out a better way to profit from my personal data without exposing me to all the risks current policy poses" - I will not be blogging. Thanks for reading some of this business, I'm sure that it will all stand somewhere in their servers for all time, a monument to my medical adventure!

Before I go completely, if you are trying to save music off an ipod (or ipod touch) that has music your computer ate, destroyed, removed, etc, and you are on a mac, try DeTune. It works. Don't pay money for something that can be done for free!!!

A Beautiful Scheme

It all started when I decided I'd like to have good pictures of my baby, once he hops out. A new camera. Not one of these primitive film-operated gizmos that charge dozens of quarters every time you need some prints, but a real, honest-to-goodness digital machine. Naturally, I sought the solution at Amazon.com (may they offer me some small token of their appreciation). Yea, and having placed an order for what can only be considered a beautiful little camera, I did wait. Oh, how I did wait. Delivery placed on the 24th of December. Yes, I made some shopping on the very Eve of the holiday. Shipping delivery estimate: 7 January. I don't know how the maths work there, but it did strike me as a bit generous on time, that estimate. Nevertheless, hope and all that convinced me to think I might even take the new camera with me to the eastern coast, where I spent the first full weekend of the new year. Time does pass quickly, tho, don't it.

Here we are, on the 13th day, which is a Friday. The camera never arrived. Indeed, the good people at usps never even received the package. Or rather, the tracking number Amazon gave me was never recognized by the system. Amazon is fully convinced that the item is somewhere "lost in transit," while I am equally fully convinced that my order never shipped. See, when I placed the order, the camera that I was ordering was described as "only 1 left in stock, order soon." I did order soon, but I'm willing to bet that someone else did as well, and that theirs went with better shipping, or more accessories, or something else that made them better than me. And so, the camera was out of stock. My order was already placed, so (according to my conspiracy theory) they decided to save face by making usps look bad - "see, they lost it after we gave it to them, they're too lazy to even scan the item into their system, even tho they created a tracking number!" Naturally, I'm not deceived. I know that somewhere out there some other lucky kid got a great camera for post-Christmas, and all I got was the replacement (which should arrive with expedited shipping tomorrow). Not sure I learned any lessons here, but I will eventually be very happy with my camera!

Update Jan 18: The original order arrived today, here's the tracking information I got off the usps website:

Note that I spoke with Amazon customer service on the 13th of January. Seems a bit coincidental that the camera suddenly popped up in the usps system on the day I spoke with Amazon. More suspicious still is the fact that the package arrived having been opened and then taped shut again. Here's what happened: Amazon thought they sent it out on the 28th, which is when they generated a tracking number for it. The package sat on a shelf in Amazon warehouse for the next 15 days. When I chatted with customer service, they sent a "find this package" notice to the warehouse, and suddenly the package "appeared." Before sending it out ("again"), they opened the package to make sure that the order was right, then dropped it into a real mailbox and off it went. Five days later, here it is! Too late, but better never than that, in this case. Now I have to ship the stupid thing back to them - postage paid, of course!

Off the Wagon?

Well, not really, not like that. But I haven't posted in a long time, so I thought I should update my status. Since I last posted, I found out that I'm going to be a dad, and I taught two new classes, and I finished writing an article on something about pottery, and I was asked to review an article for a very interesting journal, and I bought a whole slew of books, and I got to see Paul Simon and La Bohème and the Nutcracker, and I got a new espresso machine, and I discovered Portuguese coffee in Bloomington, and I learned about how heat pumps work, and I did a lot of other things too. We had several really good friends come visit us over the past few months, and then some of them moved off to other parts of the country/world, but it was awesome to have them visit us here in the Middle, because it really is a very nice place to be. We're planning to have other people visit us in the near future, because until the new person comes along, we're going to have at least one fully extra room, and we can arrange things to work out even after he's here - he won't need his own room for a few months, anyway.

I haven't been keeping up with my old soccer regimen; the weather, my work schedule, and the people in charge of the field space around here have all conspired to keep me off the grass. Fortunately, I can still ride my bike as often as I want to, and whenever I'm on campus I get to climb 6 or 7 flights of stairs, to keep me at least a little bit fit. I do have a great view out my office window, I've posted a couple pictures on that "networking" site, but here's one such view:

Since I'm going to be a dad, I am now accepting mailed gifts - preferably things like Benfica jerseys and Portugal costumes. Well, Portugal did manage to qualify for the 2012 European Cup and Benfica managed to make it out of a really easy group in the Champions League, so that's the justification for those two selections.

Oh, you probably want to see the new espresso machine. My friend Alex gave me a Gaggia Espresso a few months back (quite a few months back, as it turns out!), and I have been happily trucking along with that for quite some time. But I recently developed an urge to go with a machine that has an all brass boiler system, and the Gaggia is only halfway there, so I had to explore my options. I happen to know a guy who knows everything there is to know about such things, so I contacted him and he told me a small portion of what he knows - enough for me to know that I should just take his advice and get a killer deal on the Rancilio Silvia.

So that's the new machine. Thanks to Mr. Les for making that dream possible. I'm currently seeking a new home for the Gaggia, so if you know anyone, tell them to email me. Works perfectly, I have even been keeping it set up, just in case I need to entertain a dozen people with espresso some afternoon (which seems highly unlikely). You can see that the Gaggia has some pretty unique styling, and I can assure you that it makes espresso as well as it looks like it should! I'll be sorry to see it go, but I'm not allowed to keep two machines, according to the contract that I signed way back when.

Ok, I have to go learn some more songs for a thing I'm doing in a few days. Should be a good time for everyone, but for now I have a lot of work to do. That guitar I bought a few months (years) back is still doing its job, I suppose I should upload pictures of one or the other of those sometime.

Finally, the foot is great, no issues, no problems, not even something I think about anymore! The screw they put in my foot so many months and years ago seems to be doing everything it is supposed to do, and in fact I haven't even noticed any issues with the weather changes over the past several months, unlike my knee, which sometimes is disappointed with these pressure fluctuations. Ok, that's really all I have to say about all of that. Happy Christmas, everybody! Or Happy New Year, or Happy Spring, since I probably won't blather on again until sometime in March!

AT&T Teaches Us a Math Lesson

Alicia's job has a negotiated 24% discount on AT&T wireless plans. This includes existing plans. Our plan has been in Alicia's name for over 2 years. The discount applied to our account? $2/month. Why? Because they applied the 24% discount to "her" $9.99/mo. line. This should mean that when I call and cancel my line tomorrow, her plan will cost us only $8/month. I'm so excited to save all this money, I don't know if I'll be able to sleep! (stay tuned for my update...)

Here's what UPS did to my watch's shipping carton

I am about to detail the unfortunate experience of my watch and its shipping container at the hands of an irate (or careless?) UPS employee. If you are averse to violent or graphic images, please do not read any further. If, on the other hand, you are used to such images, and are even sadistic enough to want to see them on a regular basis, this is a unique opportunity to do so on my blog. I do not plan to update this post with further images, so enjoy them while you are able.

This unfortunate story begins with my extremely generous in-laws, who were kind enough to buy me a watch for my graduation. I'm thrilled, because I've wanted an eco-drive watch ever so long, but never had any means of acquiring one. Now I have both the means and a (somewhat) valid excuse! I searched the entire internet for the best watch for my needs, and, having found said watch on amazon.com (props to Amazon for their broad selection - I'll accept any endorsement fee through my paypal account), ordered it on Sunday. Even with the Memorial Day festivities looming, Amazon expected the package to arrive on the 1st, i.e. Wednesday, via that ubiquitous shipping company UPS. This is where things started to turn sour. Alicia and I had to go out for some groceries in the middle of the afternoon on Wednesday, and on the drive back to our apartment I spotted our local UPS delivery truck. Naturally, I was somewhat excited at the prospect of having my new watch on my wrist by the early evening! I waited patiently in our apartment for the next hour or so, my anticipation growing with the passing of each minute (I had to use my cell phone to tell the time, btw). By 5:30pm I was becoming anxious, so I, in my excitement, waddled out to the front door of the building to see if the UPS truck was perhaps sitting in the parking lot as the driver finished with some less important deliveries. It was not. In fact, to my bitter surprise, there was an InfoNotice on the door of my building, informing me that the driver had been unable to deliver the package. Apparently, I wasn't home after all.

This has happened to me before, but this time I was especially annoyed at having missed a package by sitting on my couch instead of waiting on the bench outside my building. I called UPS to find out whether there would be any possibility of picking up the package at their customer service location downtown before Alicia headed off to work, and I was told that the local office would contact me to confirm a pickup time. By 6:30pm, I knew that the jig was up, there was no way they would call me on Wednesday. At 7:50pm, the infonotice data online indicated, in three separate entries, that the customer (that's me) would pick up the package that day (1.3 hours after their 6:30pm closing time?). This was starting to sound ominous, as I would only expect the system to need one line to tell me that, and in the past the branch has always called me to tell me whether the driver would be back in time for me to make the pickup before closing time. I wasn't too nervous, though. I figured I could get the watch on Thursday morning without too much hassle (it's only a 10 minute drive downtown to the office).

Thursday morning arrived, and when my cell phone showed 9am, I headed down to the office. Upon my arrival, I handed over the infonotice and the representative headed back into the warehouse to find the package. It took her and her assistant about 5 minutes to track down the box, it was apparently on the wrong shelf. When it appeared, it looked like this (look away, if you get queasy):

I stood there for a couple minutes weighing the options available to me: I could refuse delivery, citing the obvious signs of abuse, and then reorder through the good people at Amazon, who would doubtless make no trouble for me (they never have before, but then, I've never refused delivery before, either). Alternatively, I could take the thing home and see if the watch itself, or its immediate packaging, had been harmed in transit. Amazon is pretty good about these things, so my photographic documentation of what UPS had done to the box would probably be enough to set up an exchange without too much trouble, should the need arise. I decided to take it home and see how the watch itself was doing before trying to figure out if I should exchange the watch or not.

Unfortunately, the condition of the box didn't magically improve on the drive home, but I did get better shots of its sad, misshapen form outside the UPS shop and again in my living room (again, avert your eyes if you've a weak stomach):

The inside of the box wasn't too bad, and the watch itself was packed well enough in its own small box that there was no obvious evidence of damage. I've managed to set the watch and get it running, so I'll track its accuracy over the next several days to see how that is. If there are any issues, I've got both an Amazon and a Citizen warranty against defects and problems, and I'll let them hash things out with UPS if any conflicts eventually do arise. For now, I'm quite happy with the way the watch looks and feels, it's surely going to improve my quality of life dramatically, and I also expect it to contribute in a positive way to the image that my hair has already helped me to craft. After all, I am my hair, innit?

Out with the old

And time to start something new. See, I recently finished a bit of a thesis on late Roman Spain, and I've entered the post-project funk of having nothing important to do (or just not wanting to do the important things that I should now be doing). In any case, I've returned to the laptop to move on with a new project, much shorter in duration (I hope!), focusing mainly on the pottery from somewhere in Spain. Pretty fascinating stuff, if you're interested in this sort of thing, which I am.

My foot hasn't bothered me at all lately, so I'm thinking about developing a new injury elsewhere, perhaps something wii related. Soccer thrice a week in this 90 degree weather isn't going to make my old kelme duende amancios (size 9.5) very happy - they turned 4 this past April - so if anyone finds a lead on some new ones, please to pass along that information. By the way, they stopped making these cleats.

I've recently received a new espresso machine, much happier than the krups xp2070, whose pump seems to have lost a good deal of power and eventually gave me nothing but weak coffees. The new machine (new to me, anyway), was given by a pair of amazing friends from Mexas, and the machine works beautifully. I'm refining my grind settings and tamping procedure to accommodate the new 58mm brewbasket, and as long as I can keep the calcification down in the boiler, it seems like I'll enjoy this new machine for years to come. Of course, I won't object if someone decides to mail me a commercial machine along with those replacement cleats.

Well, since I'm working again, this blog is wasting valuable Spanish emailing time, so I'll get back to that. If you'd like to know more about my soccer cleats, feel free to post something in the comments section. Happy summers!

The world didn't end?

But maybe a lot of people won't be showing up for work tomorrow, I don't know. If the rapture happened yesterday, then I missed it. I like to think we've got a second shot at making the grade over the next few days, months, or years, but my end time theology is just not as robust as it could be, so I apologize for not offering much security on that front. I was relieved, in a sense, to finish my phd before this particular rapture, because frankly I put a lot of time into that thing and it would have been a bit anticlimactic to get swept up just days before finishing the degree.

Speaking of degrees, we just bought our first totally awesome piece of furniture. I can't talk much about it right now, it's still kind of emotional, but it's going to look really nice in our new apartment, especially now that we have a new accent rug to go with it. Yes, it has been an eventful week or two. I realize that it has been a long time since I updated my readers on events here, but I can't really think of much more to tell you. Yes, I did replace the intake manifold gasket on our car recently, with no adverse effects, and perhaps, once winter returns, with some positive results. The wife has a few different job options out there now, to go with my one job, so I think we're going to make it through yet another calendar year. Yay for us.

That's about it from here, any questions or suggestions for future stories? Sorry that things have become so uninteresting lately!

The ravings of a madman

Yes, I think I quoted someone in the title, but it's a loose paraphrase, and I'm not making any money off it, so there it stays. But I am a bit fired up today. Because I had to spend several hours fighting with someone we'll refer to as "ppt," made by some global software corporation that we'll just refer to as "ms." My problem was simple: I wanted to adjust the default blank presentation template to get rid of that horrible font, Arial, which is the default. I also wanted to set a different default background and edit the default settings for inserted text boxes. See, a simple problem (or small set of problems). All I had to do was change the defaults in a program that a lot of people use all the time. Good luck with that, though.

As it turns out, ms has arranged things in the 2004 mac version of this software so as to make it virtually, or perhaps literally, impossible to change the default characteristics of a blank presentation. So, after I had tried about a million different options, all of which were complete failures, I just made a template that I liked and then set the program to offer me that option as a "slide design" in the formatting dropdown menu. I also resolved to stop purchasing products from the company that wants me to use some dumb font that no normal person would ever want to use. So that's part one of my complaints for the day. Feel free to post your solutions in the comments or in the guestbook section.

Part two of my complaints relates to a fact that I discovered yesterday. I've been buying a Brasilian decaf coffee (the roast is done locally, but the beans are imported from Brasil) to supplement my standard daily espresso habit with an afternoon chaser, without all the extra "juice" that caffeine gives me. This particular variety of coffee bean, technically known as Coffea charrieriana, naturally contains no caffeine, so it's supposed to be a great alternative to all the chemically-processed garbage that so many companies still have the gall to call "coffee" once it has been decaffeinated. I started buying the stuff to see if I could handle the flavor, and it turns out to be quite pleasant, at least in the Opus 1 (medium) roast that our coffee-emporium markets. The problem, I've discovered, is that the caffeine content has been replaced, through some [naturally?] defective gene that produces theobromine instead. Theobromine, as we all may or may not know (and as I found out yesterday) is basically the same thing as caffeine, in terms of how it affects the human body, though perhaps slightly less potent. So my interest in avoiding the effects of caffeine by purchasing this naturally un-caffeinated coffee has been dealt a severe blow. Sadly, the news came as no surprise to me, as I've been feeling a bit "hopped up" in the afternoon of late, and this feeling is what led me to research the beans more carefully yesterday. It does come as a relief, though, in that this particular coffee is quite expensive, and causes no end of economic suffering to our family.

Speaking of economic suffering, part three of the whine-fest that is today's blog entry involves the good people down to the revenuers. I had the good fortune of going through our taxes yesterday, and discovered, much to everyone's dismay, that some of the companies that pay us for our services have been less than thorough, or even sufficient, in setting aside the proper monies for federal and state collectors. We owe about what my new TV was going to cost, come August, and so we'll suffer on without an LED 240hz monster for another, unbearable, twelve months. Sigh. We suffer. My, how we suffer.

As my loyal readers are by now fully aware, I like to end all entries, conversations, and activities on a high note, and so I'll finish with the best news of the week. I'm very much looking forward to an upcoming visit to a potential employer, not least because the more I read about the city, the organization, and the position, the more interested I am in finding out how I might fit in there. Sure, I have to be realistic about my chances, and about the other positions that are still dancing around the bush, trying to get their acts together so they can all have a shot at my attentions, but right now I'm really liking the one that shall for now remain nameless. Keep thinking positive thoughts on my behalf, or maybe hoping and praying that we'll all have clarity and wisdom as we face the decisions that we have to make.

GPS? Or Wall-E?

So I was thinking about GPS today, and then I was thinking about that (average, at best) movie Wall-E, in which humans have placed themselves so deeply in dependance on technology that they just lie around all day drinking smoothies. While there are a lot of obvious advantages to being fed all the time without even having to lift a finger (I can see the advantages, anyway...), there are obvious downsides as well. Remember when we used to just remember all of our phone numbers? I could rattle off pretty much every friend/acquaintance/family member's phone number. Not because I wanted to, or because I was cool, but because I was too lazy to want to have to look the things up every time I needed to call anyone. Now I can barely remember my own number, let alone of those I call very frequently. Sure, I recognize them when they pop up on my phone's caller ID, but that's hardly even important, since my phone also knows who's calling.

So do I really want to cripple my already-mushy brain by removing yet another burden from the multi-system subtexting that still goes on, in an at least limited way? Or do I skip the GPS, suck up getting lost a bit more often than would be ideal, and ward off alzheimers and other brain-degenerating diseases for a few more years? Just a thought. No need to comment...

Speaking of comments, nobody was bold enough to venture a guess as to which beans are which in the previous post, so here's the key: the darkest beans are, not surprisingly, Starbuck's "medium-roast" beans, and those are located on the far left of the photo; next (in the picture) come Archer Farms "light roast," and those are roasted slightly lighter than the Spotlight beans, whose roast is undeclared. Finally, the lightest roast, and the beans on the far right, are the NovoDia Supremo beans. Get some at TJMaxx for $10/kg! They're pretty rad, for the price.

Finally, please notify your local colleges and universities that I'm not going to be on the market forever, and if I end up in an awesome tenure-track job right out of grad school, I'm unlikely to be on the market again. Ever. So your opportunity to have a world-class expert on many things that some people might be interested to know is rapidly slipping away. I'm just saying...

Happy 2011, just a couple weeks late!

And the Winner Is...

...well, you be the judge: These are three photographs of the exact same thing, just taken with slightly different flash/lighting settings. The idea here is that there are four different kinds of coffee, ranging in claim from medium to light roast (and one that makes no claim at all). Your task, like mine, is to try to figure out which is which is which is which. So try to arrange them in order from "light" to "dark," according to the company responsible for them. Then arrange them in order from lightest to darkest roast, in real life (regardless of what the company thinks it has done). I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by which is which is which is which. Brands included in the scientific survey are: Archer Farms Fair Trade Guatemalan Light Roast (scale: light to dark roast), Starbucks House Medium Blend (scale: mild to x-bold), Spotlight (since 1891 or something like that, no scale), and NovoDia Supremo Light Roast (scale: light to dark). Sure, it's a crapshoot. But what fun is life with no mysteries? I'll update with the correct answers sometime later this month or next. But I'm secretly very happy with how this all looks.

In other news, there are loads of universities lining up to try to hire me, but some of them aren't aware that they want me just yet. They'll figure it out soon enough....

There, I've wasted too much time today already. Sorry for the short post, but a mystery/riddle posting should consume enough of your time to keep you happy. Until next time, here's to coffee!

Fall Backward?

Well, what I mean is that it's almost time for the clocks to change their time, and therefore the unofficial - but more convincing - fall of Fall is nearly upon us. I don't expect much qualitative change in either the weather or the moods around here, but there is this upcoming election business, and maybe after that we'll finally be able to get on with our lives and stop complaining about how things are or could be or were or should be. All that money wasted, to convince us that one essentially well-meaning politician is wholly good, while their opponent is wholly evil. I'm still not sold on any of that. But this isn't supposed to be about politics.

Somebody stole my lucky pen last week. So I was going to write sooner, but I couldn't, because of the pen thing. Also, check this out (see photo):

"But, Benficafiend," someone might exclaim, "didn't you buy a Taylor 110 off that guy on craigslist?" Indeed. "And doesn't the Taylor 110 come with those crappy Ping p.w. 1 chrome tuners (with the 1:14 gear ratio)?" It does. "So does this mean you bought a brand new, higher-end Taylor guitar off some chump on craigslist for far less than it's worth?" Nay. Methinks that one Taylor guitar is enough for our household. "So you've traded the 110 upwards for a superior model, with gold Ping/Grover p.w. 2 tuners (with the 1:18 gear ratio, and Taylor stamped on the back)?" Wrong again. Maybe stop asking questions now. It's really quite simple: while I was very happy with certain features of the Taylor 110 that we found on craigslist, e.g. the volume, action, and sound depth, certain other qualities left me a little unimpressed, namely the crappy stock tuners and the nasty plastic (tusq) saddle, with it's slightly-off-center intonation. So I have had to invest $40 in some upgrades, which involved replacing the plastic saddle with a bone one that I made and buying the gold tuners from a fellow Taylor-owner on craigslist. I would venture to guess that it's about the nicest Taylor 110 now in existence (because who else would be stupid enough to try to upgrade such a cheap guitar?!).

Meanwhile, the search for a worthy owner of the other guitar that I bought off craigslist continues, mostly because I'm just not really investing any time in trying to sell the poor thing. It's not a hated guitar, just not as nice as the rest of the flock, and, now that the Taylor is around, not a particularly welcome member of the club. So much for things having to do with guitars.

As may be expected, the vast majority of my time is still consumed with the editing and revising and rearranging of the dissertation, which I am happy to say has been building some steam over the past several weeks. Eventually, it will all be arranged into something that people can read all as a single object, but for now it's still chopped up into six different and only-slightly-related chapters. It's getting a little out of control, meaning too long and too involved, but I'm pretty sure it will eventually be as thoroughly ignored as it deserves. After I've cleared that final hurdle, I suppose I'll have a job all lined up somewhere, but I kind of have to do all the work to make that happen, so I've been sending out the occasional job application in my spare time. There are some pretty nice jobs out there, and I'm a fairly interesting candidate, so you might expect a benficafiend to pop up just about anywhere in North America over the January-to-March interviewing season. Or not. I suppose they could just as easily ignore me as give me a job. I'm not really worried about the job market, because in the worst-case scenario, I just find something else that I really enjoy doing, finish writing my second book, and pick my next job offer based on where it is and the quality of students the program attracts. Not a bad situation to be in, if it comes to that. But I'm sure my wife would much rather see me in a new job by August of 2011, so you can all hope and pray us in that direction.

Don't forget to sign the guest book, you know who you are! :)

Things That Are Kind of Fun

First off, Mrs. Anderson would have us avoid the use of "kind of," apparently because it lacks specificity. I still use the phrase occasionally, despite the 9th-grade warnings against its dangers. Here's the theme of the week: guitar rehab. See, I bought this guitar on craigslist, and I'm hoping to sell it at a very small profit (making it a flipper, I guess, or a flopper). There were a couple minor problems with it when I got it, which means I had a bit of work to do to get it up to my high standards before trying to sell it. One thing I can't and don't want to fix is the presence of a few small dings on the top and on the headstock. The way it see it, these give it character. Plus, I have no idea how one would go about fixing those. The guitar came with a plastic nut and saddle, and while I have no intention of chiseling out the nut and making a new one to install, I did pull out the crappy saddle and upgrade to a bone saddle, with what I believe is a much better profile. The strings were cutting into the top of the original saddle a bit, so this seemed like a natural upgrade. Note that the notch cut into the bottom of both saddles is an unfortunate consequence of a factory-installed under-saddle piezo pickup. The pickup sits too high in the saddle slot, so I really had to work the underside of the new saddle to make sure that it sits evenly over the entire length of that pickup. Annoying. It is nice having a pickup in the guitar, though, I think that makes this thing a bit more interesting to play, especially when I have to get up on stage and rock out. Aside from the saddle replacement, I also thought it would be a good idea to dress the frets and adjust the neck a bit to make it play more like a classical guitar and less like an electric. I figure if people want a nylon-stringed instrument, they're going to want relatively high action so they can really pull some sound out of the thing. But if they don't like that, they can always adjust the neck back down. I don't really care what they do after they buy it! Ha. Oh, finally, the stupid people over at the factory somehow thought I'd want to tie my guitar strap to the headstock, so they didn't bother installing a strap button on the neck side of the body, or in the heel. I had to do that for them. Since it's a cutaway, I went with the heelcap position rather than the underside of the heel. Very clever of me, so as to allow for full use of all those extra frets on the body! (note that the previous owner seems to have considered putting a button on, so there are two pin-point blemishes on the underside of the heel - bad form, don't you think?) Anyhow, that's all the news that's fit to print today. Most of it's probably not even fit to print. But if you're in the area, and looking for a mighty nice guitar at a reasonable price, let me know. I'm not even charging for the time I've invested in this guitar, that's how nice I am!

More "News" Than Anyone Requested

So look, we're all depressed about Spain winning the World Cup. But they really did manage to pull off some pretty convincing wins against one or two of the seven sides they played, and I don't think Germany would have been THAT much better had Müller not gotten a bogus booking that prevented him from playing in the semi-final. It's starting to look as if you just have to be consistently decent, never great, in order to win a World Cup, so let's hope Portugal can actually do that for a change next time around. The Euro will be a good start. And that's all I have to say about soccer today.

I have continued work on my magnum opus, the boring dissertation, since I last blogged, and I am confident that I will have the whole thing more or less finished by late August. This is excellent news for many of my readers, who have been avidly following my every academic move in the hopes of eventually gaining the rare privilege of reading my forthcoming book. Don't worry, we're only a couple years from that event! But seriously, I kid. The thing should be done soon, which fills me and only me with a great deal of happiness.

Those of you who have been wondering if I was ever going to upgrade my coffee grinder will be pleased (and somewhat startled) to learn that I have done so, and with very pleasing results. Accompanying that bold move was another upgrade to the current espressing system, whereby the pressurized filter baskets that came with the xp2070 were replaced with krups part #0907163 (purchased here: http://www.amazon.com/Krups-0907163-2-Cup-Filter/dp/B000PJ6R8A), the non pressurized variety. Capresso's infinity 565.5 (also from amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Capresso-565-Infinity-Conical-Stainless/dp/B000VAWXOU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1279753773&sr=8-1) does just the trick for the grinding, and my custom tamper has eliminated all need for gymnastics and gyrations during the espressing process. I am quite pleased.

Well, that's about all I can say about anything, I have been EXTREMELY BORING lately. We had some friends breeze through town on their way to Tejas, which was lovely, and we've been going out to eat some, because it's cheap with some magical coupons that we get through some website that my wife knows. Aside from those entertainments, I have to say that I'm quite disappointed with how uninteresting July has been, even with the end of the World Cup included therein. It's almost over, so that's good news, I suppose.

Until next time, this has been exciting and informative, ¿no?