It is important to keep things in perspective.

Today I got to go on a tour of my university's book bindery (is that what it's called in English?) which made me realize that I might just try to get a job there instead of being a librarian or whatever.  I say "whatever" because it is basically impossible to get a job as a librarian here.  Anyways, it was SOOOOO completely awesome.  About 10 years ago I had a great short term job in the art department for Colorbok, making prototypes for the stationary and little bookies and funny little things there.  This type of work is like, the less silly and more official version of that, so I would love to work as I book binderer.  Bindist?
Next up, a really interesting lecture about the evolution of preserved writing/press/books, where we got to look at old ass books from the 1400s to the 1800s.  Including a Gustav Vasa Bible (above), which was the first version of the bible in Swedish.  Even my heathen and generally bible-hating heart can appreciate the word of god in this form (I mean, I do love books).  Apparently this thing cost about 7 horses when new!  We also got to look at several other books, including a little mini book about 5x3x0.5 inches in size, (or maybe smaller), about Cicero, from the 1700s - one of the first "pocket books" made in Sweden and another book worth about 200,000 dollars, made in pre-chapter and pre-paragraph indentation times... some time in the 1400s.  The man who donated it to the library bought it for about 50 dollars sometime in the 1940s, and it was by far in the best condition of all the books we looked at.  I got to feel the paper, and it was so sturdy and... fresh looking.  The print job and the paper combined looked like something bought from a really expensive paper shop nowadays.  It was fantastically made and preserved.

The lecture ended with the following piece of work - a job announcement from the University of Göttingen, 1748.  I'll try my best at translation.

Competency requirements under the hand-press era could be very high, which Matthias Gessner, a librarian at the University of Göttningen in 1748, gave expression for:
"He (the librarian) must have a noble and generous heart, which can overcome his avarice, and who is able to put the library's interest above his own.  He shall have a kind attitude towards library borrowers/patrons and the ability to give them good service.  He shall also have a feeling for beauty, accuracy and cleanliness.


He must have mastery of Latin, Greek, French, Italian, English, Spanish as well as the other biblical languages.  He must be able to understand the nordic languages and be able to work with documents in German dialects, middle-ages Latin and the Slavic languages.  Yet, most important are  abilities/understanding of the history of learning.  The librarian shall not merely know author's names and titles of representative work, and know which editions are best:  he shall also be able to show that he has knowledge within all branches of science.

Beauty Saturday

Warning!  This post has to do with my skin.

This is take-two after the first picture I placed here was a bit ghost-facey.  But look at my hair!  Although it looks lightened, this is really just a product of two things.  First, the shitty light sensor in my webcam, and second, a cheap beauty product diy bender.

Let me explain.  Every once in a while I read about all the toxic chemicals in beauty products these days and some of those times, I feel determined to take matters into my own hands.  I never do it, that is, until today when I checked the health rating of my face lotion here.  This prompted me into a google chain-search from home made face lotion to "the oil cleansing method" to castor oil for keratosis pilaris, a skin condition I have.   So out I went into the world, to buy a bottle of castor oil and a jar of coconut oil (my new remedy for my skin condition), and the ingredients to wash my face with oil - the "oil cleansing method."  Health toxicity craziness aside (I really tend to not give a shit after the first 5 minutes of thinking about this stuff. I mean, while I don't want my future kids to develop a third eye from too much ingestion of whatever, trying to live without absorbing crazy chemicals is completely futile), while a good chunk of my practical behavior would seem to say that I don't care or don't like to take the time to care about how I look, there is a good 35% of me that wants to try to care.  And I would also like to try to care in the cheapest way possible.  This led to:

Regimen


Oil swishing of teeth with sunflower oil - is backed by research actually using the scientific method!  I read several pieces of source material this morning, but I mostly wanted to try it because it seemed so weird.  I did, however, gag and almost throw-up approximately 6 times.

Oil wash of face with olive oil - meh

Oil wash of face with mix of coconut oil and castor oil - very sticky

Hair wash with only cider vinegar and baking soda (bikarbonat) - like washing with sand!

Lotioning myself with coconut oil/castor oil mix - almost painfully sticky

Results

Can't really say anything about the bacteria count in my mouth, so I'll hop over the oil swishing.

Oil wash with olive oil - I didn't really do this right, so I was naturally a little underwhelmed.

Oil wash with coconut oil and castor oil - actually pretty amazing because my face feels clean and not dried out, but doesn't feel greasy at all.  I even put on a light patting of the mix on my face after I showered, as my face felt a little dry after wiping away with a towel (google "oil cleansing method"). No visible blackheads on my nose (where I usually see them), and no shininess where I am usually shiny from oil production after washing with soap.  TMI?  Sorry.

Hair wash with vinegar and baking soda - see above picture!  I had been wanting to do this for awhile mostly just to see but also because all the harsh sulfates in shampoo make me itch like crazy (i use very simple soap without lathering sulfates for this reason - although I have a few shower gels I really like and use occasionally for their smell).  SO, my hair feels all light and fluffy in a good way, and is not at all dried out even though it sort of looks like it in the picture, and most importantly, it is not greasy or dirty feeling in any way.  It basically feels great.

Lotioning - this was rather difficult.  It felt like I was trying to pull my skin off because the castor oil is so thick it creates a load of weird friction.  But the oil soaked in rather well, I'm not greasy, and I assume it will take some time to help with the keratosis pilaris, so I'll have to get back about that later.  I did rub pure castor oil into a scar I have on my shin, which is about a year old.   Maybe I should take before and after shots to see if the scar really does fade over time.  The most important thing is: I am not itchy!  I am usually always itchy after showering from getting dried out, even after putting on regular lotion.

Conclusions 


While I'm down a lot of money from recently buying a new jar of regular face lotion on top of today's purchases, today's purchases were still cheaper than the regular face lotion and will probably last 3 times as long.  I am super happy that I do not feel greasy or itchy, but this whole process took more than an hour, which is a lot to ask of someone who only can seem to care about 35% of the time.

Don't ask me for a definition of "the time."

UPDATE:  I really feel like I should add that I was particularly not-clean before all this.  I hadn't washed my hair in maybe 4 or 5 days (whereas I usually wash it every 3 days at the most) and had also sprayed in dry shampoo earlier in the morning before I went out to buy this stuff.  My dry shampoo, although it works, tends to make the hair feel dirtier, with a coating of weird chemicals, even though it looks better.  I also hadn't washed my face with soap in probably 2.5 days, although I do frequently wash with just water and a wash cloth.

These dudes

First Laugh of the Day

Old times, same genes.

My grandparents are the two on the far left of each row.  I didn't really know them at all, as Grandpa Paul (Cool Hand Luke, there) died when I was 4 and Grandma Velma (originally Wilma!) wasn't really so interested in me - which also really didn't bother me so much, I guess.  I hadn't seen her or spoken to her in years before she died and the last communication we had was about her recipe for chicken paprikash; it was also nice to speak with her.  I can't say I mourn the lost relationship so much as I am curious about our similarities, which may or may not exist.  I also have the world's most cutest and kindest Grandma Madeline that ever existed, so that helps, too.

Yet can we not agree that we are physically similar, despite of course, my roundness?  I have spent my entire life laboring under this annoying fallacy that I am a carbon copy of my mother, from the shape of our feet to our entire "constitution" to our brain chemistry.  This sort of belief itself is of course the kind that comes along with jargon like "constitution."  To proverbially beat the dead horse, yes, I just threw up in my mouth (it used to be such a good expression, but I read it left and right on various blogs that it just aint so special anymore, thus the proverbial beating and not the beating of the proverbial dead horse).  However, I see so much of myself in my grandmother - in the shape of her forearms, her shoulders, her neck, and really, her entire face.

My mother was adopted and I have virtually no knowledge of my father's family.  In a way, I realize this doesn't matter so incredibly much, but I am curious.  Who are my ancestors beyond my grandparents and what did they work as?  What did they find joy or turmoil in?  What was their middle ground, average everyday existence like, and where specifically did they come from?  Did they believe in god or were they secularized?  I know my great Aunt Margaret (grandma's sis?) was a lawyer.  Even that knowledge, the fact that I had a female relative who was a lawyer - back in those days - and the fact that she and her husband were disbarred is a shimmering jewel of delight in my brain.  I'd be interested to know if they ever thought that their great niece, in 2011, would find humor, much less delight in that.

These two bachelors were my great uncles (dad's dad's side).  What were they up to?

I'd like to have something to offer my future kids in the form of a little family history, at least.  Not that I want to or even can compete with my ol' man: shit, he can trace his family back to the 1500s.

Wheektor, Curator at the Nilssonian Institute of Flies

October 4th is the birthday of my oldest friend, Adam.  When I say that he was my oldest friend, I mean that in the most precise method of hippy time measurement:  I was at his birth (along with probably 20 other friends of his parents, their babies, a midwife and probably a doctor).  His siblings were likewise present at my birth, at my parents' home in the student family housing campus at a certain midwestern university.

While I still see Adam occasionally at family/holiday events (he wasn't technically "family" until the union of the parents of my nephew, but for all intents and purposes, we are cousins), my time is more recently spent with a certain friend born on October 4th, some 2 or 3 years later: Viktor "Wheeektorious" Nilsson.

The above picture of Viktor in an attitude reminiscent of french neoclassical portraiture, is surely appropriate for placement within the Nilssonian movement, that is to say, it captures the essence of what it means to be a person whose abilities encompass the ideals inherent in scientific thought, processes and inquisitiveness, as well as kindness and humor.  While style is not de facto it certainly transforms this specimen into type material, sui generis.

As for what he is doing here, I wish I could explain more, but instead of fully listening I was caught in raptures by the lighting arrangement.  Basically, this is his food chamber, where he grows and harvests plankton for his juvenile damselflies.

Viktor is also the genius ornithologist who makes music videos with birds (see below a few posts) possible.  On my one and only trip to the island in the Baltic where all this magic happens, I was perusing various ornithological journals with him and began to notice all the Professional Hating (Academic Deathmatch?) going on within articles, aimed at defending previous works, but mostly with the intention of being able to talk shit in an official arena.  I'm not really sure how this rampant lambasting willy-nillying makes it passed peer review, but in any case, I am highly thankful to Viktor for opening my eyes to the unbelievably entertaining facet of human interaction called "academic discourse."

A recent example, found within my own field:

Case Study

Marcia J. Bates vs. Birger Hjørland

• Bates writes a critique of Hjørland's critique of her own "efforts in defining and conceptualizing information as a core concept in information science (Bates, 2005, 2006)."
• A quotation which represents significant ire, notwithstanding the move to invalidate Hjørland's academic mien:                                                                                                                             "There is a standard of coherence, consistency, and logic that is expected of an argument presented in a scientific journal. In discussing my ideas, Hjørland so severely misrepresents what I say that the reader would think that I am developing a totally different set of ideas than, in fact, I do. A fundamental premise of scientific discourse is that one should argue against what the other person actually says, not against a misrepresentation of what the other says. It should not be necessary to state something this obvious but, apparently, in this case it is."   (Bates, 2008.  See above link)
• Oh, another quote!  Here, Bates proclaims that Hjørland not only sees the metaphorical "man on the moon" but proclaims he exists.  Well, sort of... and if you think this analogy goes overboard, she continues in the next paragraph by pulling Pangea and the relative placement of North and South America out of her hat.  This is a favorite personality type of mine to talk shit about too, so I can't really blame her.  I frequently say about someone with close familial ties: "if a tree fell in the woods and _____ didn't see it, did it really fall?"                                                                                                                                          "Hjørland seems unwilling to countenance the possibility, expounded in my articles, that information, differences, in the universe can exist in some objective sense while at the same time, we humans observe those differences according to our own subjective perspective, whether that of an individual with numerous idiosyncracies or as a member of an intellectual community that approaches those differences out of a specific conceptual paradigm. The patterns of organization we observe are, in many respects, constructed by us. We see the “face” of the “man in the moon.” There is, of course, no man in the moon, but our imagining of a face in the moon is not baseless—there are mountains and craters that create a pattern on the surface of the moon that allows us to see that pattern as a face."  (Bates, 2008.  See above link)
• And a few choice sentence fragments:  "The overriding impression he leaves is one of incoherence and fragmentation," "Familiar as I am with my own articles, I find it very hard to recognize my work in Professor Hjørland's description,"  and "My own argument is considerably subtler and more interesting than this simplistic description."  (Bates, 2008.  See above link)
• Thankfully, in contrast to the abstract, where Bates refers to herself in the third person, the article proper takes use of the much less ridiculous first person personal pronouns (singular, not plural!).  I can only assume this is a method de jure, although I would seriously love to read a full he-said-she-said article in the third person.

Plenty more extreme examples can surely be found out there, and this one was only special because I found it while researching for my presentation last week.  In another vein, Viktor is also the proud owner of this book:

The Hazards of Butterfly Collecting reads like a self-aggrandizing memoir of the Indiana Jones of bugs.  Highly entertaining!  Which makes me wonder if anyone has done a study of the archetypes within academia and/or infighting?

So, Wheeek, tack för att du finns.  Thank you for being you, and thanks for your friendship.  And thanks for introducing me to these subtexts within research.