January 17, 2021

Studied all day. Enjoyed it. 

Started to feel bad around 6pm, after I'd finished.

Sunday Night Syndrome with added pandemic.

My next assignment is to write a 2000-word critical review of a short paper on burial customs in the Upper Palaeolithic period.

Reading the paper prompted me to google not just the entire Palaeolithic period and all its evolving cultures but also the Samburu and ǃKung peoples, the Slovenian language, periostitis and rachitic lesions, ochre, the definition of ritual, shamanism, the author of the paper and every burial site (around 20) mentioned in the paper.

Although I haven't yet started writing the review, I did find a useful list of Slovenian idioms and swear words. I learned the author of the paper shares her name with Czech playwright and a tennis player who's won a total of $98 in prize money so far. I also discovered the Samburu have starred in films alongside Kevin Bacon, Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas, featured in an ad for Mastercard and also a Nike ad:

"Samburu runners were famously portrayed in a late 1980s Nike commercial, in which a Samburu man's words were translated into English as the Nike slogan “Just Do It.” 

This was corrected by anthropologist Lee Cronk, who seeing the commercial alerted Nike and the media that the Samburu man was saying “I don’t want these. Give me big shoes.” 

Nike, in explaining the error, admitted to having improvised the dialogue and stated “we thought nobody in America would know what he said.""

(Tristo kosmatih medvedov! But nice to see anthropologists being useful I suppose.)

Hours consumed by interesting tangents.

And they wonder why it takes neurodivergent people longer to do things.

After dinner I read an article called The Day The Dinosaurs Died, about the day the dinosaurs died.

Found a link to the University of Kent 'Covid 19 Business Recovery Response' webinar series, some of which look worth a look even though I am the opposite of business and business-minded.

Opened my mail after ignoring it all week. A belated Christmas gift from a niece. A book I'd ordered. The letter telling me I'm eleventy milllionth in the queue for a vaccine. My Oh No pin.

Today's pic: Work Tomorrow!

Pondering deep-time sort of helps to put measly homo sapien concerns into perspective I guess.