Waking up at 5:20 is not a good thing.

AM or PM. Aak. I hate this virus.

But enough about that. Is there a name for a writing style where you begin and end a piece of prose with the same line? I've seen it a number of times, most recently in Girl by taraljc. I almost - but not quite - did the same thing in Recalculation, and I don't even know what the trick is called.

Gaah. The things that pop into the head at six AM...

I hate being sick.

Random pondering

More study, with a break for chicken soup. The aches are fading, while the cough and sniffles are getting worse - I guess that means the bug is running its course. Woke up at 5, crashed at 7, slept until 10, then back to it.

Fic is crawling around the back of my brain, bits and snippets, nothing coherent enough to induce me to set aside the law notes for the writing. But it's still annoying.

One takes amusement where one can find, I suppose. Just remembered a story from World War II, brought on by musings about coffee. Which I don't drink, can't stand, but go figure.

Anyhoo, I don't exactly remember the source of this, but here goes:

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I think it was in Portugal, or another neutral country. The British wanted to hamper the German embassy's operations, but they couldn't really get their hands dirty, so they subcontracted out. The mission: destroy the German embassy's Enigma encryption machine. They found a local hotshot who was willing to go into the embassy and blow up the Enigma.

Trouble was, while the guy may not have lacked for guts, he didn't have a clue about machinery. The British tried to describe the Enigma to him, but after some blank looks, they finally said: "Look, just get into the embassy coding room and blow up the most complicated piece of machinery you find there."

Which he did. Snuck in to the embassy and set his charges, lit 'em off and nearly got himself blown sky-high in the process. He got out and reported back: mission accomplished.

So you can understand that the British monitoring stations were a little perplexed the next morning when the German embassy transmitted its daily report ... in Enigma-encrypted code.

And one imagines that the Germans must have been scratching their heads as to why someone would sneak into their embassy coding room just to blow up the coffee machine.

Close entry.