Holy water has nothing on this

Life is unfair when you find a shelf in a used book store containing six novels by Alistair MacLean and not one of them is The Guns of Navarone (1957).

(I got HMS Ulysses (1955). About seven years ago I was trying to write a story that included a fictitious WWII Arctic convoy, so if nothing else I can count it as someday research; also, it looked good. But still.)

She's dragging all her words, giving them new skins

Happy autumn. I just read that DNA evidence affirms that Indigenous Australians are the most ancient continuous civilization on Earth. I find it equally wonderful that in the same way that all humans of non-African descent contain some percentage of Neanderthal DNA, all humans of Indigenous Australian descent contain about 4% genetic admixture from "an unknown archaic population . . . that is closer to Denisovans but also sharing a common ancestor with Neanderthals," i.e., people on this planet we didn't even know about. On being told this last fact, my mother said promptly that she expected it was the gods. I don't know if the deities of Australian myth are the kind that have children, but I like that she thinks of this sort of thing first.