Give me a pearly white smile! There you go. Now consider this: the calcium in your teeth was cooked up inside a giant red star, billions of years ago.

The debate about nuclear power has escalated with the approach of the final deadline on Monday for appeals against Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Mohammed Valli Moosa's approval of a pebble bed modular reactor in the Western Cape.

According to an arcane superstition pre-dating the Enlightenment, I can be a bitch at times. We all can, now and then, but my predisposition was determined by the position of our sun in relation to a specific arrangement of celestial bodies a few hundred light years away, at the time of my birth.

I wake with a snort, roused by the clatter of a ballpoint pen hitting the floor. It spins idly to a halt, put there by the same peaches-and-cream striped paw now tapping one end of it. How easily the modern quill is reduced to a plaything! Blink, blink, blink. The cursor on my computer screen winks expectantly. Above it, the line: To breed or not to breed … Blink, blink, blink.

Give me a pearly white smile! There you go. Now consider this: the calcium in your teeth was cooked up inside a giant red star, billions of years ago.

The debate about nuclear power has escalated with the approach of the final deadline on Monday for appeals against Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Mohammed Valli Moosa's approval of a pebble bed modular reactor in the Western Cape.

According to an arcane superstition pre-dating the Enlightenment, I can be a bitch at times. We all can, now and then, but my predisposition was determined by the position of our sun in relation to a specific arrangement of celestial bodies a few hundred light years away, at the time of my birth.

I wake with a snort, roused by the clatter of a ballpoint pen hitting the floor. It spins idly to a halt, put there by the same peaches-and-cream striped paw now tapping one end of it. How easily the modern quill is reduced to a plaything! Blink, blink, blink. The cursor on my computer screen winks expectantly. Above it, the line: To breed or not to breed … Blink, blink, blink.