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I continue my epic quest to buy Italian train tickets. Am beginning to wonder if it's actually worth the effort of pre-booking, given that I can get tickets for the sleeper to Milan via Deutsche Bahn (I know that works, anyway).

I seem to have developed a weird fondness for Star Trek fics which are, I suppose, best described as gen fics about sex - that is, ones that involve characters trying to get their heads round other kinds of sexual and cultural norms and imperatives. So I very much enjoyed Zvi's "The Talk", in which Sarek attempts to educate a very unwilling Spock, who has just entered puberty at the age of twenty (rather young for a Vulcan) about human biology: humour, SFW (given that much of the humour depends on nothing being explicitly stated): How could you do something like that to my mother?

Quite a lot of the humour comes from the assumption that Vulcan puberty is later than human (logical, given a longer life-span) and, thus, the disjunction between Spock's thoughts, which are in some ways very rational, and in other ways that of the outraged child who is fairly sure that what he's just been told about reproduction is some sort of weird practical joke, and in any case, yuck.

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The Grauniad has a small, but rather nice, interview with Leonard Cohen: (I always had a notion that I had a tiny garden to cultivate. I never thought I was really one of the big guys. And so the work that was in front of me was just to cultivate this tiny corner of the field that I thought I knew something about, which was something to do with self-investigation without self-indulgence.)

On an unrelated note, but also at the Guardian, Adam Smith is blogging an Alpha course. Must remember to follow that (and not to read the comments, this being CiF); it looks like it could be quite an interesting series, judging from the first post. As far as I can see, the Alpha Course can be quite a good resource, and the most important bit is the discussions it enables, anyway - though it's woefully lacking on the sacramental and ecclesiological side (but then, I would say that, wouldn't I?)