Vantro

We had our first day of Summer a day after everyone else in Iceland and took Friday off instead of Thursday. As it is now my last week we organised a paintball game for Friday afternoon, followed in the evening by a meal, a party at Lilja's and finally drinking in town until the wee hours. The paintballing went as usual except the last two games. In the first of these two I was allowed, as my leaving present to stand in one spot while the rest ran around in front of me with no guns. The guy in charge then told everyone to stop running and stand still, whilst I blasted them to oblivion. I was laughing so hard I was crying. That was my goodbye present to everyone he said. Then it was their turn to give me a present, which basically consisted of dressing me in a rabbit suit and forcing me to run in front of everyone else whilst they blasted away at me. Three times. I have curious shaped bruises up and down both sides of my body, which will last longer than my time left here in Iceland...

Paintball bruises, not mine, but imagine this multiplied by 1,000,000 and you have an idea what my back looks like...

Over the weekend I watched 'Metallica, Some Kind Of Monster', the documentary following the breakdown of the Metal band Metallica. It was fucking hilarious, but what struck me was after listening to two hours of listening to Lars (Ulrich, Drums) spouting Psychobabble the most interesting thing I found myself concentrating on was Kirk (Hammett, Guitars) eating a Burrito. It was amazing. He spread the nachos out on his plate in a little crescent, even neatening them up so they sat around the edge of the plate. Attention to small details which is definitely shown through his high paced and intricate soloing on songs such as 'Dyers Eve'. He then took the burrito and cut it in half with a knife. From one half he spooned out a small amount of some unknown substance and smeared it into the other half. Brilliant, compulsive viewing. In all semi-seriousness, it struck me as interesting because it isn't often you get to see big stars doing mundane actions, such as eating, taking their kids to ballet and the like. To me, growing up, Metallica did nothing but play METAL and drink BEER. I never considered the fact that they need to eat to live.

Even Metallers need to eat...

It was the Icelandic Elections this weekend, the first since the Independence Party led coalition government bummed the entire country into debt. I was out on Saturday night in Dillon and there was a computer set up showing the results as they came in. I got chatting to some guy and he was explaining what the different colours represented. Now, call me stupid, but I would have thought that if a party like the Independence Party had fucked the country up so Royally as they did, then people would have lost faith in them. But oh no, not the fucking sheep that live in this country. The Independence Party ran in second place all through the election, they were only beaten by the party they were in a coalition with when they bum fucked the country. I have lost complete faith in the Icelandic population due to this result, not that I had much anyway. It's the same as a school bully throwing a rock in your face then demanding that you pick it up for them to do it again. Revolution was in their grasp and the idiots let it go...

Vote for the Independence Party!!

Gaman Av Drømmer

Less of a rant this time, I promise. Well, actually I'm not in a great mood so it may get ranty. Just to warn you. Despite it nearly being the first day of summer (this Thursday, in case you were wondering...) and having had a relatively dry winter, the ground water started rising in Area C at a distressing rate. It was like a flood of biblical proportions, furniture and driftwood were floating past as were attempted to trowel off more dumping layers. Two people were lost at sea, feared drowned, so something had to be done.

Area C, yesterday

The solution was this, dig a hole in the corner of the site with the machine and shove a pump in. This worked a treat until we realised we were actually pumping out the Tjörnin pond, in the centre of Reykjavik. Ducks were standing about on newly formed muddy islands. Also the bottom end of the site was being flooded even worse than the top end. Until someone shoved the pump outflow into one of the many conduits we can see on the edge of site. This seemed to work, the ground water dropped, nobody mentioned to anyone else about the drop in the level of the pond and somewhere in Reykjavik a Primary school had it's basement flooded with stagnant pond water.

Also yesterday we had a Norwegian Iron Working Expert come all the way from Norway to tell us the iron slag that we had found on site that was produced in iron working, was in fact, iron slag produced from iron working. I wish I had a job like that. Anyway he gave a lecture in the evening which I didn't attend. I have never in nearly ten years of Field Archaeology attended a lecture given about a site on which I have been working and I don't intend on starting now. First War Aeroplanes? First in line. Archaeology? Running screaming.

Viking Age Iron Working from Hals. as dull as it looks...

The arrival of a Norwegian Expert on Iron Working caused quite a stir in Iceland and the TV sent out their finest reporters to cover the story. Here is the report, unless you speak Norwegian or Icelandic there is little of interest until later on where you can see the kind of shit we get up to in Area C (when there is no water...) and the Spindle Whorl that I found and that caused so much hatred on Facebook:

New Report

One final thing, for those of you still unsure as to whether John Clay is a thoroughly nasty man or not, I allow you to be your own judge on this picture, taken before Clay attended his friend's Bar Mitzvah, I think the girl on the left is Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS.

Photo removed due to Fascists.

Lyktemenn

A quick review of my weekend, Friday, I found a spindle whorl on site, covered in runes, which makes this last eight months seem somehow worth it..., then films and drink, Saturday morning breakfast and arguments with Jo, record buying, films, half a bottle of vodka and town til six, Sunday recovering from said bottle of Vodka and Town.

Again since being out of contact with the real world via the Internet I have had to turn to other forms of entertainment to see me through this week. I have been watching a load of films to fill up the gaps between work, so this entry is going to be a film review rather than anything else, you may want to skip to the end as it gets a bit ranty... I was planning on going out on Friday night but instead I found myself watching the 2008 German film The Red Baron. I may have mentioned my passing interest in First World War aviation, so I have been wanting to see this film ever since it came out and I was quite excited to see a film about the highest scoring Air Ace of the war, Manfred Von Richtofen. In the event it would have been better that I gouged out my eyes with a spoon and vomited on a pile of shit, then attempted to stare at it through my empty eye sockets. I'm a stickler for historical accuracy in films. The Red Baron was littered with badly researched nonsense. Starting with the planes themselves, we see Lanoe Hawker VC flying an SE5a during a dogfight. The SE5a was not in operation until 1917, a year after Hawker was killed. Hawker, if you bothered to read that Wikipedia article was in a DH2 when he was killed by Richtofen. Lets do a little test. Spot the difference in the following pictures:



Yes, that's right, the top one is a DH2, the bottom one is an SE5a. You will notice a few, albeit subtle, differences between them. One has a Rotary engine, the other an inline engine. One has a maximum speed of 93mph, the other 138mph. One has a service ceiling of 17,000 ft, the other 14,000 ft. Oh yeah; ONE OF THEM HAS IT'S FUCKING COCKPIT STICKING OUT IN FRONT OF THE WINGS. A completely different airframe layout that is not easy to miss. Unless you work in the Research Department of Niama Film.

Another picture of an SE5a and and DH2, I may send this one to Niama film company

With the power of the Internet at our fingertips isn't it easy to find out what kind of plane Hawker was flying? It tells you half way down his entry on Wikipedia for Christ's sake. You would think that with all the effort that goes into producing the CGI for a film like this then they could spare a little more to find out what crates people were whizzing around in at the time.

Alright, I'm probably being pedantic and the difference in planes in film doesn't amount to a hill of spit for most viewers, but there are people like me who have a little knowledge about the subject matter. And one has to assume that these are the kind of people the film is directed at. But furthering this problem, the film is so bad that these mistakes become glaring anomalies, a film about First World War aviation that features about three minutes of actual flying sequences? We see mock ups (as good as they are) of period planes taxiing after a mission, where dogfights are discussed but we don't get to see them. Why not? Surely this is one of the main reasons I'm watching this film? Did the budget run out after making several expensive mock ups of the planes that were used for ground shots only? Did the researchers realise that they had the wrong planes at the wrong times so cut down the sequences in an attempt to try to make people like me not notice? We will never know.

One further point that really irked me, and harks back to The Unforgiven, was the inclusion of a fictitious Jewish character (Friedrich Sternberg). This political correctness gone mad. It is the German film industry's answer to Hollywood's ubiquitous Black Character. Let me clear one thing up, I am not racist, I abore it, like most normal thinking people. It repulses and horrifies me. But worse is when political correctness is rammed down our throats as though we are stupid and need to be educated in how 'everyone is different, but at heart we're all the same'. I know Jewish people fought in the German army during the Great War, I also know the political difference between Germany in 1914 and Germany in 1939. Please grant me with a little intelligence about the subject matter of the film I am watching. It annoys me because there is no need for this character in Richtofen's story, he adds nothing besides the other characters casually mentioning he is Jewish and him painting a Star of David on his plane.

Niama Films have begun filming their latest latest war epic, entitled 'Hitler, What a Bad Man!', this production still shows Adolf's politically correct personal SS Bodyguard

Speaking of racism, for those of you who still don't believe me that John Clay is the embodiment of Evil, take a look at these recent postings from his blog. This one show early sociopathic tendencies already inherent in the young Clay. Here he betrays his Christian Zealotry. It gets worse as he gets older with his attempts at creating his own Mein Kampf. I am fully expecting this Man Trap to be in place when I arrive at his house in York in a month. My days are filled with dread for the time where I will again be subjected to his cruel and unusual torture methods.

John Clay relaxes at home

Norse

This is my first posting for a wee while. I have been away on a road trip around the entire Icelandic sub-continent with my parents who came to visit for a week. Also confounding my output is the fact that Atli's computer died on me the other day. He'd lent it to me when my own computer finally went tits up. Atli's has come down with the same problem and shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible. Conjoined with this we got a bill for the first six weeks of Internet use in the house. It ran to nearly one hundred pounds. This included a bill for their technician to come out and not do the job he'd been asked to do.

Pretty much how I feel about computers right now...

Enough about this nonsense, lat week was dominated by the arrival of my parents, they had been blackmailing me to stay as long as I could so they could come over for a visit. I would have quit here a lot sooner had they not been coming. Anyhoo, we embarked on a road trip which was initially supposed to take in the South Coast and a bit of the Eastfjords, but turned into a marathon dash around the entire ring road. The going was easy after the obligatory day in Reykjavik, dull little town that it is. The southern part of route one was easy going in good conditions, they oohed and awwwed at all the right places. I'm not going to bore you with the places we visited as it won't mean much to most and I pretty much took them to all the places I visited just before Christ's Mass with Justin and Lucy. We continued on up the East coast and I convinced them to carry on with the driving and head for Myvatn and Akureyri. We had been slightly put off by some English Hippy Naysayers in Cafe Margret, but the owner of the cafe, a massively toothed German woman told us the roads would be fine. Fine maybe for someone in a tank with 4WD tracks. The little Toyota Yaris we had was thrown about the road by the piles of ice and snow like a cork in a washing machine. The going wasn't made easier by driving at 40 KPH with the attached frustration from my father.

what 'good going' on Icelandic roads does to a Yaris...

We finally made it around the full ring road, my first time, but we had to miss out on a planned trip to the Snaefellness peninsular due to snow and ice on the gravel roads. Reykholt and the wonders of nature that like in its proximity had to do instead. Being so close to Reykjavik we decided it would be better and cheaper to head back to my place and spend the night there. The following day we spent tootling around Keflavik and the surrounding area, finishing with a trip to the Blue Lagoon for my mum, as she had just sat for two days in a car. They left the following day and as I haven't heard anything since leaving, I'm assuming they got home fine.

Troll, Død Og Trolldom

I was out with Jo on Friday night, trying to drink away the week day blues. We were standing in the street as she was stuffing a Pylsur into her gob and we were talking about how small Reykjavik is and how she sees the same people out all the time. I was arguing the case that I never seem to see anyone I know. Just as I had finished my point the girl who works in the take away over the road from my house walked past and said hello. Nice timing love. Then I saw Una and a bunch of her mates in Kofi Tómasar Frænda. It was further pushed onto me the next night when I was out in Bar 11 and I saw two girls dancing surrounded by about fifteen salivating men. I thought I recognised one of the girls and finally worked out she was the waitress that works in the Diner we sometimes go to for lunch. Small fucking world. That' s the main difference between here and home. I can go out in Rotherham, a town that has the same population size as Reykjavik, and see the same faces and go to the same bars. If that gets boring I can hop in a taxi and go to Sheffield, a place with nearly three times the population of Reykjavik. Here you can't do that. Reykjavik is the largest place you can go to. It also occurred to me that for the same cost in Taxi fares I can get from my home in Rotherham to Sheffield (journey time approximately 25 minutes), or from Downtown Reykjavik to my flat (Journey time approximately 5 minutes). Where's the justice in that?

Reykjavik, it really is as dull as it looks...

OK I'll leave the dullness of Reykjavik behind and move onto this weeks film reviews. I haven't been able to see Watchmen as I was away when it was released and Atli couldn't wait a fucking week for me to come back before going to see it. It is only being shown in cinemas that require your own transport to get to and as my car is locked away in a garage in Rotherham it looks like I will be missing it at the cinema. So instead I have been watching a few DVDs. I watched Zatôichi The Blind Swordsman. I have seen it before, thankfully, as I didn't realise the only subtitles on the film were in Icelandic...

Being blind never stopped Zatôichi fucking up everyone that got in his way...

I also watched The Unforgiven, brilliant film, but I was left wondering why nobody during the entire film mentioned that Morgan Freeman was black. Now, before you start accusing me of racism, please bear in mind this film is set a mere twenty years after the abolition of slavery. It is full of nasty characters who would undoubtedly think nothing of attacking a man for his skin colour, at least verbally. Especially during the scene in the sherriff's office where Freeman is being whipped. I'm not a racist, but I do prefer my historical accuracy to overt Political Correctness. I'm not the only one that thinks this, John Clay commented on a similar thing in his Blog. It's a minor issue in what is an otherwise brilliant film.

The good old non-racist days of the Wild West

The other films I watched this week was The China Syndrome, a very good Nuclear thriller starring Jane Fonda and also Flyboys. Now if you know anything about me, you will know that I am mad on First World War Aeroplanes, so Flyboys seemed like a great choice. How wrong I was; I would rather be trapped in a burning SE5A falling from 20,000 feet than have to sit through those two hours again.

A far preferable fate than having to watch Flyboys again...

I Ondskapens Kunst

Before I start I suggest you read Richard Pell's blog, it's here. I like it, you might too. OK, plugs over... My feet were bad on Wednesday, they were dry and the skin was all split. I could hardly walk on them at all. I thought I'd better lay in bed all day and rest them, so I didn't go into work. At precisely Eight minutes and eight seconds past eight o'clock, I got a message from Jo which simply said 'You are a cunt.' Talk about no sympathy, I would have loved to have been at work, cleaning off endless stones, using the total station to record them all and marking them with chalk ready to be removed. It would have been brilliant to have been asked by Duncan whether this pile of stones was 335 or 334, or were the pebbles 335 and the stones 332? As it was I was laid up contemplating what to have for breakfast and whether I should have it in bed or not. I can't believe she was so unsympathetic. To add insult to injury, today she found a beautiful piece of wood with a series of Runes carved along it. It is probably one of the nicest things I have ever seen outside of a First World War archaeology setting:

This piece of wood with a runic inscription is the first ever proof of Vikings in Iceland.
Photograph copyright Jo Taylor

I'm going to talk about the Melabúðin now. It's my local supermarket and I probably spend more than enough time than I should in there. I usually call in most evenings on the way home from work to pick up essentials, the little things we all need, like food. I spend more time there than is reasonably expected because of the lay out of the place. It is like a bear pit, a Chinese fire drill if you will.

Melabúðin, Hell on Earth

They have managed to cram as many shelves into the place as possible, leaving it almost impossible to get to what you need. The aisles are about three inches (7cm) wide making the shopping experience like tight rope walking across Niagra Falls.

Another satisfied shopper enjoys the Melabúðin experience

There appears to be another curse in this place. As I walk in the place appears to be empty, no queues at the tills, I feel elated, I can choose my few purchases and be out in seconds. By the time I've picked some bread there is already a mosh pit forming in front of the meat counter. Fighting my way through this, I arrive at the vegetable shelves (there is what seems to be an Icelandic curse on vegetables that means you have to eat them within 24 hrs of purchase or they turn into black lumps of compost in your fridge...).

Quick! Get those vegetables to a fridge, we have no time to waste! Every second is precious!!

After picking up the already rotting veg I move to the milk fridges, fighting past the ubiquitous shelf stacker who manages to spread the products all over the floor rather than on the shelves. Grabbing what I assume is milk, I'm ready to get to the tills to pay and get out. I arrive in dismay to see a queue has formed out of nowhere comprising of at least half the population of Reykjavik. Now we turn to the next problem. Icelanders have no idea of how to make their purchases and clear off out of the shop. They dither about wondering whether to pay with a card or cash whilst the cashier piles up their purchases up on the area for packing. They don't decide to get their wallets/purses out whilst waiting in the queue, oh no, they do it when they should be putting their products in the plastic bags. So here I am waiting for someone to find, then fumble about with and finally put their change/card back in their wallet/purse, then return that to their pocket/bag. Only then do they begin to start to pack the plastic bag, by which time the cashier has started piling MY products onto the area already inhabited by the previous shoppers products. It's like a collision of worlds, the shoppers want to stay as long as possible imbibing the shopping experience, whilst the cashiers want them out as soon as possible, like they are working on some bonus scheme for the amount of shoppers they can serve in a day. As a final insult in my shopping experience at the Melabúðin, if I am not fast enough to get my things into a bag, usually due to the person in front of me still packing their bags, then the cashier starts sending down the next customers items. It's like being under a cascade of produce. There are hands everywhere grabbing at whatever they can. I hardly ever come out with the items I paid for...

Melabúðin in 1912, the ancient shop layout has not altered once. It was based on the Labyrinth of Minos

Valdogg

Continuing the theme of Bjarki's inappropriate behaviour, Bjarki, Atli and Lilja made a video for Fun Day, which they showed on Saturday. It was called 'Episode VII Revenge of the Brits' and was basically a piss take of everything that happens on site, from Angelos not getting into work until midday, Hrappi asking stupid questions about nothing ('Alex, what would you do if you woke up an you were Lilja?'), Hrappi being the biggest brit-licker on site, the inability of a some of us to use the total station, Sindre's explosive temprement, etc. I was chatting to the B man after the showing and he was telling me about the parts he wasn't allowed to leave in by Atli and Lilja. He had an idea for a skit based on him asking the German girl what her Grandfather had done in the war, they would look away all thoughtful, the scene would cut to the part in Schindler's List where the Nazis are herding the Jews into the gas chambers. It would cut back to the girl saying 'Oh nothing, he was to young to take part.' She would then ask Bjarki what his Grandfather did in the war. He would look away all thoughtful, the scene would cut to Bjarki's Grandfather shagging a sheep. It cuts back to him saying 'Oh nothing, he was too young to take part.'

What Bjarki think all Icelandic Granddads did in the war*

I spent Sunday in the company of Jo and The Lady In The Cage. It's a film, not a real lady in a cage. Jo hasn't been sent mad by the 24 hr Polar Light and started kidnapping people, don't worry. Well, not yet anyway... Maybe if she stayed in this fishing camp longer than five weeks she might. Anyway, it's a great movie staring a young James Caan, it's pretty brutal for its time and I recommend it. Jo then began watching Cleopatra (Which I was always under the mistaken idea that it was called Antony and Cleopatra), it's a four hour movie and I need lots of beauty sleep so I left her to it.

A lady in a cage, but not THE Lady In A Cage

Duncan was away on Monday and Tuesday so chaos reigned in Area C. There wasn't his calming and authoritarian figure to fall back on so very little was done. We fucked about half a ton of stones out of the tent, finally getting rid of the frigging things... They have been there for what seems like a life time and I think it's high time we got rid of them. Duncan doesn't agree and just wants to keep taking photos of them. Anyway, we did it when he was gone. Igor and I ripped the massive one out with the mini digger! IN YOUR FACE JESUS!!! See what happens when you go away for a holiday!!

Jo's photograph of the stones that aren't there anymore.... Note the large sacrificial stone on the right used for killing Polar Bears that don't have the right documentation

* Is this too far? I wasn't sure if this was in bad taste