Welcome to Scholarly Roadkill

Saturday, December 10, 2016

Mitch’s blog, Scholarly Roadkill, is part of a consulting business, Scholarly Roadside Service, detailed on this website.The blog will cover topics I'm interested in, not only scholarly publishing, but archaeology, dance, the university, writing, scholarly life, and the absurdity of the 21st century universe.  We have no facility to sign up followers, but if you click Like on our Facebook page, you’ll get announcements of new posts. Guest blogs welcomed, just let me know what you want to write about. 

Efficient Apologetics

Wednesday, September 25, 2024

It would be unfair to use the stereotype of Germans as orderly and efficient to describe them. Anyone who has had to transfer planes at Frankfurt Airport will know that the universal is not universal. Yet we discovered in Germany what we might call an orderly fervor for apologizing for what their ancestors have done.

Germany has always had a sinister sound to me. Growing up in a suburban LA Jewish neighborhood a decade after the end of the war, we were reminded of Germany’s actions a decade before. My parents, who fought in and worked the home front during…

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Entertainment or erasure

Friday, August 16, 2024

Poland had approximately 3 million Jews a century ago. Now there are less than 5,000. For those on all parts of the political spectrum who volley the term “genocide” about so carelessly, there is a lesson here on what the term actually means.  My visit to Poland with Jubilee American Dance Theatre had an unexpected confrontation with my Jewish identity as well my world of dance.

I don’t consider myself particularly interested in Jewish issues. I grew up in a suburban Jewish family in Los Angeles and received a moderate religious education after school instead of being on…

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Dancing Around Auschwitz

Thursday, August 08, 2024

It was Sunday, the last day of the Jubilee Polish dance tour. We were to perform in Oswiecim. The town used to go under a different name, Auschwitz. 

We tried to arrange a tour of the Auschwitz concentration camp before we left the US. Our guide in Bielsko-Biala responded to our email a few days later—no tour group slots were available for the one day that we were free to go. But we could go individually and tour the camp on our own. When we arrived, I arranged for a group to go on Monday, ordered taxis through the hotel,…

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Who is Alice?

Friday, June 28, 2024

The question of the day was supposed to be archaeological, not literary. Who built Stonehenge, not who is Alice?

A Stonehenge exhibit at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria seemed a good excuse for a day trip on one of our last few days on Vancouver Island before returning to the Bay Area. The exhibit had been organized by some archaeologists in London, a couple of whom I had published in a previous life, who had been excavating at Stonehenge in the past few years. So we took the two hour drive through Ladysmith, Duncan, and over the…

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The Tamga Revolution

Sunday, March 24, 2024

I’ve been immersed in the next volume of my archaeological project on Sistan, Afghanistan. Several years ago, I built a folder called “Tamga” to file all the related notes and photos. I finally got to that folder this month. And discovered something potentially revolutionary.

Tamga are identifying marks carved or painted on objects. Pottery often has these marks. Other objects can have these as well—metal vessels, coins, even symbols on buildings or associated with rock carvings. The term tamga comes from Turkish because the phenomenon has been extensively studied related to Central Asian Turkish nomadic peoples,…

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Patience

Sunday, January 28, 2024

PATIENCE IS A BULLSHIT VIRTUE.

That’s the sign affixed to the door of my home office. Stark bold caps in black on a washed white background. The sign was a present from Cyndi, former colleague, who helped me shut down Left Coast Press 8 years ago, then stayed with my various archaeological projects as editor, proofreader, scanner, and organizer. We tackled a Baluch ethnography, a history volume on Kandahar, and the big archaeology book in sequence. Cyndi has a Ph.D. in something called childhood studies and accomplished these things for me in addition to her many other diverse activities…

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Snow Fall

Wednesday, January 17, 2024

Everything was beautiful, until it wasn’t. The back trail to Lake Enos snakes downhill through the firs and around the lake. It’s a bit steep in a few places, but never difficult. The lake is framed by rows of trees, with thick logs floating in the center. Raptors float overhead. Vines, now covered with filigrees of snow on each leaf, dot each side of the trail.  A couple of low spots had filled with water, now slick ice, but I carefully dodged those. The snow was almost gone after a week of freezing but dry weather. Made it down three…

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The Pop Tart Screen Play

Friday, December 29, 2023

This line of thought started with the morning sports show talking about the Pop Tarts Bowl, held yesterday in (appropriately) Orlando, Florida. The payout to the two teams was somewhat north of $6 million. Congrats, Kansas State! The morning show had massive linemen popping tarts into their mouths. I assume the same was true under the bowl’s previous name, the Cheez-It Bowl.

Back in the day, your only sponsors were various flowers, fruits, or sugar, without C&H moniker attached to the name. OK, I do understand how these sponsorships help colleges: half of $6 million can fund a lot of…

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Country Roads

Monday, November 06, 2023

There was a football game on TV Sunday morning at dawn Pacific time. Not content with filling up the normal US sports watching hours, the NFL has added games played in Frankfurt (and London earlier this fall) to give the dedicated watcher a full 18 hours of weekend gridiron. What grabbed me, though, was not hordes the fans dressed in the colors of the two teams (Kansas City and Miami), but the break between quarters when the loudspeaker system blared out John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads. Everyone was standing. Everyone was singing. Everyone knew the lyrics…in English. Everyone, from…

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