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SCI Week 3: Second Look
If you've grown up in a small pond, and are good enough, you'll eventually get to a point where you consider yourself a big fish. Particularly if you're the youngest ( Read more... ) -
SCI Week 2: High Wire Act
Air on an E stringThe real way to tell the quality of a violin is how the highest string, the E, sounds. The G, the D, even the A, can all be camouflaged to a certain extent by the skill of the player: vibrato, bowing technique and empathy between the violinist and the instrument ( Read more... ) -
SCI: What's missing?
Everyday when Melissa came home there would be some subtle change that she couldn't quite put her finger on. Her flat was - on the surface - the same as it had been when she had left for work, and yet it somehow wasn't. She had something very close to eidetic memory: she had always managed to survive with an archaeological filing system rather ( Read more... ) -
SCI
OK, decided (finally) I'll give this another spin of the dice (if I'm in time!) -
LJ Idol Season 8: Week 9
Counter-intuitive
"Never judge a book by its cover". One of those things you are forever being told as a small child, presumably in a misguided attempt to dispel prejudices and bigotry amongst those too young even to have prejudices and bigotry. (Actually, if memory serves me right, my parents did me the great courtesy of not harping endlessly ( Read more... ) -
LJ Idol Season 8: Week 8
Travelling TravestyThroughout history, members of the fairer sex have been disguising themselves as men to go and do traditionally "male" things, such as fighting wars, from which women were barred. There were female "monks" whose real biological sex was only discovered after their deaths ( Read more... ) -
LJ Season 8: Week 7
Rock bottomIt's an oft-quoted (and equally often misquoted) cliché that catastrophe theory says that a butterfly fluttering its wings in South America cna cause an earthquake on the other side of the world. It seems like such a small thing, doesn't it? And yet the difference between having it all and having nothing at all can turn on something ( Read more... ) -
LJ Idol Season 8: Week 6
Food MemoryIt's a strange time to be writing about food, when I'm feeling sick a lot of the time, and have no appetite the rest of the time. Even some of my childhood food memories aren't working the way they ought to in terms of getting me to eat anything like properly ( Read more... ) -
LJ Idol Season 8: Week 4
What does narcissism have to do with me?
It's all about me. No, really, it is all about me ( Read more... ) -
LJ Idol Season 8: Week 2
Three Little Words
Follow your dreams.
Ever since I was 13, I've dreamt of living in France. At that time, the rather childish romanticised version of the dream saw me married to a rich Frenchman and living either in Paris or in La Rochelle, in Charente-Maritime. Or preferably both, if the Frenchman really were that rich. I was streets ahead ( Read more... )