Well, that's never happened before

Here I am, ripping through my crime paperbacks, packing these and dismissing those (books by friends! that I'm never going to read! See Chaz be ruthless...!), and I came across a handful of children's picture books, miniature hardbacks from the '60s by David Gentleman, Fenella in the South of France et al. So I went to Abe, to see if they had a value - and Abe has no knowledge of them. No one on Abe admits to owning a copy of any of these. Amazon lists them, but doesn't know where you might buy them. Ebay has none to offer. And so on.

Gosh. D'you suppose they might be actually rare, or is it just that no one cares?

In other news, a friend found occasion to use the word leucippotomy in an art class today. I'm very proud.

A scientiquestion!

Can I reasonably describe sound as atmospheric pressure-waves? [There's a bit in one of the early Lensman books where our hero - presumably a Kinnison - is on Rigel VII (or whichever the number is) and being assaulted by roadside advertising; I cannot now remember whether the assault is visual or auditory, but he is forced to explain to his host that his species is unusually sensitive to atmospheric vibrations. And the Rigellian is duly baffled, and says, "Atmospheric vibrations? Atmospheric vibrations? Atmospheric vibrations?" - which I have always loved, and am trying not to steal at this point.]

Will this nightmare never end? (No, of course not.)

Oh, ffs.

Here I was, munching bacon snack and slurruping wine as I wrote sentences of beauty and power and so forth - and suddenly there it was, a whole other chunk of tooth, loose in my mouth as it departed its proper station.

As it happens, I'm seeing the dentist tomorrow anyway, about something else entirely; and as of yet there is at least no pain; but even so. I hate this sense of constant erosion. And the being hyper-aware of other people's perfect teeth, and the vicious envy, and and and. I am aweary of it.

Here, have the very sentences I was writing:

I stopped, he stopped. I’m not even sure how I knew that. He didn’t - quite - touch the ground, I wasn’t sure he touched the air itself; he certainly didn’t breathe the stuff, he had no use for it. He made no noise at all. I suppose I knew that he’d stopped because he didn’t come past me, but how I knew he was there at my back - well, I guess you do know when you’re being tailed by one of the monuments of prehistoric England. Sight unseen, you still know it. Presence isn’t only about interrupted light and atmospheric pressure-waves. Horse can eclipse the world and hush the stars in their courses.