Trying to catch up...
Kat wrote:
>Leonora suffered from having been part of a DPR publicity
>drive to get more people tested for paranormal abilities.
>Everywhere she goes, she generates enormous quantities
>of rubbish.
>It's discovered during the course of the story that the rubbish
>she generates tends to be, well, not valuable, but not just household
>rubbish. A half-brick turns out to be rose marble, an old
>glove is 17th century Venetian kid leather, and mammoth eyelashes
>in dust bunnies.
Both Una's anegdote and this comment have reminded me of a story I read by
Borges, called "Urbis Tertius" or something like this. Imagine you lose a
pencil. You tell someone about it. Both of you start looking, you find the
lost pencil, but you don't tell the other person. So he/she keeps looking
and finds another pencil.
Such an object, IIRC, is called a 'hren', and is usually longer and thinner
than the original one. Next, Borges tells how a group of convicts were
ordered to excavate on a place which wasn't really an archaeological site,
and they came up with extraordinary finds. This is all going on in some
imaginary land, where people use ajdectives and verbs instead of nouns,
etc., etc., I don't recall all the weird details.
Anyway, to draw an analogy, all you have to do is lose a B7 video, and ask
someone to help you find it...
N.