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Week 250 – Reflection, Rumination and Making Glue From Horses

According to numerology the energy represented by the number 250 resonates with intuition and introspection.

I was not aware of this.

It also resonates with human relationships and recognizes that relationships are the glue that hold things together.

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Week 201: Graves, Literature and Almost Certainly Some Other Stuff

Almost sort of exactly 201 years ago, Jane Austen died. I must confess I haven’t read much (any) of her work despite Pride and Prejudice and Zombies being on my reading list for some time. Never being one to allow a lack of knowledge to get in the way of a good opinion however, I’m prepared to wager that her collective works didn’t contain many references to the humble kilogram.

Young Jane would have been almost sort of exactly 18 when the French said pas plus to the grain related measurements of the time and invented the kilogram. She would have been far too busy working on her short novel Lady Susan to bother with such new-fangled frippery. She no doubt noted however that the initial name for this kilogram was a grave and as such the literary seed for her zombie based works was sown.

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Week 183 – Milestones

At some undetermined moment between me starting this draft and it magically appearing in your inbox or news feed via the wonders of the interweb, Literally Stories will have surpassed 200,000 page views.

Yes indeedy faithful readers in four short years we have reached a level of activity that a Kardashian nipple or a Bieber tattoo can expect to log in just under 4 nanoseconds.

If Hugh was here this week he’d probably say something like “fuck those limelight seeking, dopamine craving, attention hugging social media whore-bastards and all who ride on them.”

But he isn’t.

So I did.

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Week 179 – Borders, gateways and tales to tell our children

In my quest to find something interesting to say in Hugh’s absence this week I did a quick Google search for the significance of the number 179.

As you can imagine the results were thrilling.

I can confirm 179 is a prime number – an Eisenstein Prime no less as it is indivisible even by complex Gaussian integers, and  Chen Prime because it is 2 less than the next prime number.

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Week 178 – Wordplay, Stories and a Post of Two Halves

Every four years the world holds its collective breath as teams from across the globe battle it out to be crowned the champions of the world.

Skill. Power. Precision.

It’s got the lot.

Sadly the Rugby World Cup is another 15 months away and so for the next month we’ve got to put up with a bunch of overpaid whiners kicking a round ball across Russia.

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Week 175 – Perspective, Invective and Uncharted Waters

Hello again one and each.

Another busy and interesting week at LS and, as always, a few unexpected twists and turns.

It goes without saying that we’ve had five more brilliant stories (more about those in a bit) but we’ve also had a whole host of wonderful submissions that have already filled up slots for the next few weeks.

That last line requires context – or perhaps perspective – in order to carry its full weight. A theme we’ll be touching on quite a bit over the next couple of hundred words I suspect.

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Week 159 – Censorship, Statistics and Odd-Shaped Balls

There’s been a good deal of debate around LS towers this week about censorship. Self-censorship to be slightly less vague. The conscious and unconscious decisions made by authors to tone down content to be entirely more accurate.

Swearing is the main culprit but there are others – and in most cases what it seems to come down to is the ability (or inability) to separate author and character.

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Week 157 – Crises, Opportunities and Tequila

…testing…testing…one-two…one-two…is this thing on?

Ah. Great. There you are. Seems to be working.

Greetings one and all from a very sunny and warm Cape Town. Hugh is taking a well-deserved break this week, leaving the roundup in my (barely) capable hands – so, you can expect all the usual features of a Saturday roundup minus the wit and intelligence (although I do hope to retain some level of profanity).

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February by Nik Eveleigh

Some days bring sunshine. Some bring rain. And somewhere along the line life settles in hard as a February sky. Locks down your dreams tight against the iron earth and dares you to object. For such a short month it exacts a long toll.

A bunch of scientists did an experiment once with fleas. They took half a dozen of the brightest and bounciest, dropped them in a jar and screwed on the lid. For a couple of days those fleas launched themselves into almost continually. Eventually, through pain or weariness or both, they stopped jumping so high. They settled on a spot two thirds of the way up the sides of the jar and that was their limit. Even after the lid came off and they could have bounded their way to freedom those fleas kept right on jumping to a place well below the potential of possibility.

Maybe I’m being melodramatic but if that leaden February sky ever clears I wonder how high I can still jump.

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Week 128 – Fathers, Flagsticks and Strictly Perseverance

The literary legend we know simply as Hugh Cron is taking a well-deserved break from proceedings this week and has entrusted me, his faithful Welsh sidekick, to come up with a few choice words to sum up the week that was at LS Towers*

* not an actual tower – more of a chateau really.

I can neither confirm nor deny if Hugh is adding something extra to his Irn-Bru over the course of the weekend but I can at least confirm that from a roundup perspective what I lack in wit I more than make up for in lack of wit.

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