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You couldn't make it up...
...and in fact I didn't. You may have assumed that
HK & Hollywood bigged together their women warriors from a couple
of Joan of Arcs, like General Hua
Mulan. You'd be wrong, it was common practice for ancient and mediaeval
Chinese military families to train their daughters in the martial arts,
and folklore abounds with famous women bandits, like Emerald Sword and
Flying Dagger (cf "Maid Marian", sigh). Not to mention the
strange, highly ambivalent true story of Colonel
Jin Xing (Gold Star)
A girl is a boy, a woman is a man.
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 "The
man had talent. His description of falling into madness through the
grain of the polished wood of his bedstead is admirable..."
Besides his unstable wild man credentials, sexual
nihilism and his charming pet rocks, John Ruskin seeded his right-wing
utopian revolution by founding the futuristic artisan Guild Of St George,
on which the Shield Ring Guild of "Rainbow Bridge" is loosely
modeled. Find out more at Brantwood.
There is no wealth but life
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 GHOSTBUSTERS
(you couldn't make it up #n=we'll have to call this normal...)
I'm not completely sure what this thing is, but you
can get any amount of ghost detecting USB devices from the store &
it is not alone. Further proof that the tech is neutral, and will happily
help the world gallop back to the Magical Age, thus (either) hastening
its own demise, (or) creating the substrate for our first attempts to
break the mind/matter barrier. Ghosts are the mind's response to cues
in the environment says the bbc. A very flexible position.
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 "The
Sun that knows no setting, that ever giveth light" (eerily
apposite text on the wall of Burnmoor Lodge)
Deep they delved us, high they builded us......
and to many people it's
an act of dreadful folly. "The main route to Scafell is disfigured
by the dumping of tons of gravel, which is already sliding down the
hillside ...almost everywhere paths are crazy paved, and any excuse
for building steps which upset the natural rhythm of a walker..."
Okay, but maybe there are worse follies around here...
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 WORLD
DOMINATION
The Game of Risk has been a character in this story from the start.
For other references see Bold As Love, Band of Gypsys, and especially
Castles Made of Sand, on the beach at Roaring Water Bay
A Game of Risk
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Golden Age of Children's Literature
Strand
My mentors in adventure fantasy were
RLS, Walter Scott and Kipling, but before that I was a child at just
the right time for the official Golden Age. Everything's so different
now. Narnia is mass market. But Rosemary Sutcliff isn't as
fêted as she should be, not yet. The Lanternbearers, her first
Arthurian novel, was a myth of origin for Bold As Love. (Not so sure
about "Sword At Sunset") And then there's
The Shield Ring: The Normans have conquered. High up among the
fells of the Lake District is a secret valley where the Northmen have
their last stronghold - or shield ring...
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A
horror gripped him, his right hand was full of blood, a bolus of solid
blood... it's called transient psychosis, 
