Trying to catch up...

Kat wrote:

Leonora suffered from having been part of a DPR publicity drive to get more people tested for paranormal abilities. Everywhere she goes, she generates enormous quantities of rubbish. It's discovered during the course of the story that the rubbish she generates tends to be, well, not valuable, but not just household rubbish. A half-brick turns out to be rose marble, an old glove is 17th century Venetian kid leather, and mammoth eyelashes in dust bunnies.

Both Una's anegdote and this comment have reminded me of a story I read by Borges, called "Urbis Tertius" or something like this. Imagine you lose a pencil. You tell someone about it. Both of you start looking, you find the lost pencil, but you don't tell the other person. So he/she keeps looking and finds another pencil.

Such an object, IIRC, is called a 'hren', and is usually longer and thinner than the original one. Next, Borges tells how a group of convicts were ordered to excavate on a place which wasn't really an archaeological site, and they came up with extraordinary finds. This is all going on in some imaginary land, where people use ajdectives and verbs instead of nouns, etc., etc., I don't recall all the weird details.

Anyway, to draw an analogy, all you have to do is lose a B7 video, and ask someone to help you find it...

N.