22 Year Old Quotes

Yes, we praise women over 40 for a multitude of reasons. Unfortunately, it's not reciprocal. For every stunning, smart, well-coiffed, hot woman over 40, there is a bald, paunchy relic in yellow pants making a fool of himself with some 22-year old waitress. Ladies, I apologize. For all those men who say, "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?", here's an update for you. Nowadays 80% of women are against marriage. Why? Because women realize it's not worth buying an entire pig just to get a little sausage!

It would be inappropiate, undignified, at 38, to conduct friendships or love affairs with the ardour or intensity of a 22 year old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry? Crying at pop songs? Dragging people into photobooths? Taking a whole day to make a compilation tape? Asking people if they wanted to share your bed, just for company? If you quoted Bob Dylan or TS Eliot or, god forbid, Brecht at someone these days they would smile politely and step quietly backwards, and who would blame them? Ridiculous, at 38, to expect a song or book or film to change your life.

No matter how old you are now. You are never too young or too old for success or going after what you want. Here’s a short list of people who accomplished great things at different ages 1) Helen Keller, at the age of 19 months, became deaf and blind. But that didn’t stop her. She was the first deaf and blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. 2) Mozart was already competent on keyboard and violin; he composed from the age of 5. 3) Shirley Temple was 6 when she became a movie star on “Bright Eyes.” 4) Anne Frank was 12 when she wrote the diary of Anne Frank. 5) Magnus Carlsen became a chess Grandmaster at the age of 13. 6) Nadia Comăneci was a gymnast from Romania that scored seven perfect 10.0 and won three gold medals at the Olympics at age 14. 7) Tenzin Gyatso was formally recognized as the 14th Dalai Lama in November 1950, at the age of 15. 8) Pele, a soccer superstar, was 17 years old when he won the world cup in 1958 with Brazil. 9) Elvis was a superstar by age 19. 10) John Lennon was 20 years and Paul Mcartney was 18 when the Beatles had their first concert in 1961. 11) Jesse Owens was 22 when he won 4 gold medals in Berlin 1936. 12) Beethoven was a piano virtuoso by age 23 13) Issac Newton wrote Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica at age 24 14) Roger Bannister was 25 when he broke the 4 minute mile record 15) Albert Einstein was 26 when he wrote the theory of relativity 16) Lance E. Armstrong was 27 when he won the tour de France 17) Michelangelo created two of the greatest sculptures “David” and “Pieta” by age 28 18) Alexander the Great, by age 29, had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world 19) J.K. Rowling was 30 years old when she finished the first manuscript of Harry Potter 20) Amelia Earhart was 31 years old when she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean 21) Oprah was 32 when she started her talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind 22) Edmund Hillary was 33 when he became the first man to reach Mount Everest 23) Martin Luther King Jr. was 34 when he wrote the speech “I Have a Dream." 24) Marie Curie was 35 years old when she got nominated for a Nobel Prize in Physics 25) The Wright brothers, Orville (32) and Wilbur (36) invented and built the world's first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight 26) Vincent Van Gogh was 37 when he died virtually unknown, yet his paintings today are worth millions. 27) Neil Armstrong was 38 when he became the first man to set foot on the moon. 28) Mark Twain was 40 when he wrote "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", and 49 years old when he wrote "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" 29) Christopher Columbus was 41 when he discovered the Americas 30) Rosa Parks was 42 when she refused to obey the bus driver’s order to give up her seat to make room for a white passenger 31) John F. Kennedy was 43 years old when he became President of the United States 32) Henry Ford Was 45 when the Ford T came out. 33) Suzanne Collins was 46 when she wrote "The Hunger Games" 34) Charles Darwin was 50 years old when his book On the Origin of Species came out. 35) Leonardo Da Vinci was 51 years old when he painted the Mona Lisa. 36) Abraham Lincoln was 52 when he became president. 37) Ray Kroc Was 53 when he bought the McDonalds Franchise and took it to unprecedented levels. 38) Dr. Seuss was 54 when he wrote "The Cat in the Hat". 40) Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger III was 57 years old when he successfully ditched US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009. All of the 155 passengers aboard the aircraft survived 41) Colonel Harland Sanders was 61 when he started the KFC Franchise 42) J.R.R Tolkien was 62 when the Lord of the Ring books came out 43) Ronald Reagan was 69 when he became President of the US 44) Jack Lalane at age 70 handcuffed, shackled, towed 70 rowboats 45) Nelson Mandela was 76 when he became President

Ladies and gentlemen of the class of '97: Wear sunscreen. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now. Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine. Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 pm on some idle Tuesday. Do one thing everyday that scares you. Sing. Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours. Floss. Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself. Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how. Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements. Stretch. Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't. Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You'll miss them when they're gone. Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll divorce at 40, maybe you'll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's. Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own. Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room. Read the directions, even if you don't follow them. Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly. Get to know your parents. You never know when they'll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They're your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future. Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young. Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel. Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders. Respect your elders. Don't expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one might run out. Don't mess too much with your hair or by the time you're 40 it will look 85. Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth. But trust me on the sunscreen.

However, there is a way to know for certain that Noah’s Flood and the Creation story never happened: by looking at our mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA).  Mitochondria are the “cellular power plants” found in all of our cells and they have their own DNA which is separate from that found in the nucleus of the cell.  In humans, and most other species that mitochondria are found in, the father’s mtDNA normally does not contribute to the child’s mtDNA; the child normally inherits its mtDNA exclusively from its mother.  This means that if no one’s genes have mutated, then we all have the same mtDNA as our brothers and sisters and the same mtDNA as the children of our mother’s sisters, etc. This pattern of inheritance makes it possible to rule out “population bottlenecks” in our species’ history.  A bottleneck is basically a time when the population of a species dwindled to low numbers.  For humans, this means that every person born after a bottleneck can only have the mtDNA or a mutation of the mtDNA of the women who survived the bottleneck. This doesn’t mean that mtDNA can tell us when a bottleneck happened, but it can tell us when one didn’t happen because we know that mtDNA has a rate of approximately one mutation every 3,500 years (Gibbons 1998; Soares et al 2009). So if the human race were actually less than 6,000 years old and/or “everything on earth that breathed died” (Genesis 7:22) less than 6,000 years ago, which would be the case if the story of Adam and the story of Noah’s flood were true respectively, then every person should have the exact same mtDNA except for one or two mutations.  This, however, is not the case as human mtDNA is much more diverse (Endicott et al 2009), so we can know for a fact that the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Noah are fictional.   There

Do you know how long a year takes when it's going away?' Dunbar repeated to Clevinger. 'This long.' He snapped his fingers. 'A second ago you were stepping into college with your lungs full of fresh air. Today you're an old man.' 'Old?' asked Clevinger with surprise. 'What are you talking about?' 'Old.' 'I'm not old.' 'You're inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age? A half minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unhooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise. Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon. Zip! They go rocketing by so fast. How the hell else are you ever going to slow down?' Dunbar was almost angry when he finished. 'Well, maybe it is true,' Clevinger conceded unwillingly in a subdued tone. 'Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?' 'I do,' Dunbar told him. 'Why?' Clevinger asked. 'What else is there?

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth; oh nevermind; you will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they have faded. But trust me, in 20 years you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked….You’re not as fat as you imagine. Don’t worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday. Do one thing everyday that scares you Sing Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts, don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours. Floss Don’t waste your time on jealousy; sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind…the race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself. Remember the compliments you receive, forget the insults; if you succeed in doing this, tell me how. Keep your old love letters, throw away your old bank statements. Stretch Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life…the most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives, some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don’t. Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees, you’ll miss them when they’re gone. Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll have children,maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll divorce at 40, maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary…what ever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either – your choices are half chance, so are everybody else’s. Enjoy your body, use it every way you can…don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.. Dance…even if you have nowhere to do it but in your own living room. Read the directions, even if you don’t follow them. Do NOT read beauty magazines, they will only make you feel ugly. Get to know your parents, you never know when they’ll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings; they are the best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future. Understand that friends come and go,but for the precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle because the older you get, the more you need the people you knew when you were young.

The frog is almost five hundred million years old. Could you really say with much certainty that America, with all its strength and prosperity, with its fighting man that is second to none, and with its standard of living that is highest in the world, will last as long as...the frog?

Carlos: "I'm 22." Logan: "I'm 22." James: "I'm 12." Kendall: "You have a really deep voice for a 12 year old." James:"I'm maturing quickly.

It's 5:22pm you're in the grocery checkout line. Your three-year-old is writhing on the floor, screaming, because you have refused to buy her a Teletubby pinwheel. Your six-year-old is whining, repeatedly, in a voice that could saw through cement, "But mommy, puleeze, puleeze" because you have not bought him the latest "Lunchables," which features, as the four food groups, Cheetos, a Snickers, Cheez Whiz, and Twizzlers. Your teenager, who has not spoken a single word in the past foor days, except, "You've ruined my life," followed by "Everyone else has one," is out in the car, sulking, with the new rap-metal band Piss on the Parentals blasting through the headphones of a Discman. To distract yourself, and to avoid the glares of other shoppers who have already deemed you the worst mother in America, you leaf through People magazine. Inside, Uma thurman gushes "Motherhood is Sexy." Moving on to Good Housekeeping, Vanna White says of her child, "When I hear his cry at six-thirty in the morning, I have a smile on my face, and I'm not an early riser." Another unexpected source of earth-mother wisdom, the newly maternal Pamela Lee, also confides to People, "I just love getting up with him in the middle of the night to feed him or soothe him." Brought back to reality by stereophonic whining, you indeed feel as sexy as Rush Limbaugh in a thong.

He didn't just dig me; he dug me the MOST. Nothing can compare to hearing something like that from a seventeen-year-old kid who looks like he might be fully awake for the first time in his academic career.

The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives, some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don’t. Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees, you’ll miss them when they’re gone. Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll have children, maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll divorce at 40, and maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either – your choices are half chance, so are everybody else’s. Enjoy your body, use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own. Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it, but in your own living room. Read the directions, even if you don’t follow them. Do NOT read beauty magazines, they will only make you feel ugly. Get to know your parents; you never know when they’ll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings; they are the best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience. I first became involved with the Czech opposition in 1968 when it was an intoxicating and celebrated cause. Then, during the depressing 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a routine committee that tried with limited success to help the reduced forces of Czech dissent to stay nourished (and published). The most pregnant moment of that commitment was one that I managed to miss at the time: I passed an afternoon with Zdenek Mlynar, exiled former secretary of the Czech Communist Party, who in the bleak early 1950s in Moscow had formed a friendship with a young Russian militant with an evident sense of irony named Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev. In 1988 I was arrested in Prague for attending a meeting of one of Vaclav Havel's 'Charter 77' committees. That outwardly exciting experience was interesting precisely because of its almost Zen-like tedium. I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me. When I asked why I was being detained, I was told that I had no need to know the reason! Totalitarianism is itself a cliché (as well as a tundra of pulverizing boredom) and it forced the cliché upon me in turn. I did have to mention Kafka in my eventual story. The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.) A couple of years after that I was overcome to be invited to an official reception in Prague, to thank those who had been consistent friends through the stultifying years of what 'The Party' had so perfectly termed 'normalization.' As with my tiny moment with Nelson Mandela, a whole historic stretch of nothingness and depression, combined with the long and deep insult of having to be pushed around by boring and mediocre people, could be at least partially canceled and annealed by one flash of humor and charm and generosity.

Dunbar loved shooting skeet because he hated every minute of it and the time passed so slowly. He had figured out that a single hour on the skeet-shooting range with people like Havermeyer and Appleby could be worth as much as eleven-times-seventeen years. “I think you’re crazy,” was the way Clevinger had responded to Dunbar’s discovery. “Who wants to know?” Dunbar answered. “I mean it,” Clevinger insisted. “Who cares?” Dunbar answered. “I really do. I’ll even go as far as to concede that life seems longer i—“ “—is longer i—“ “—is longer—IS longer? All right, is longer if it’s filled with periods of boredom and discomfort, b—“ “Guess how fast?” Dunbar said suddenly. “Huh?” “They go,” Dunbar explained. “Who?” “Years.” “Years?” “Years,” said Dunbar. “Years, years, years.” “Do you know how long a year takes when it’s going away?” Dunbar asked Clevinger. “This long.” He snapped his fingers. “A second ago you were stepping into college with your lungs full of fresh air. Today you’re an old man.” “Old?” asked Clevinger with surprise. “What are you talking about?” “Old.” “I’m not old.” “You’re inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age? A half minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unhooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise. Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon. Zip! They go rocketing by so fast. How the hell else are you ever going to slow time down?” Dunbar was almost angry when he finished. “Well, maybe it is true,” Clevinger conceded unwillingly in a subdued tone. Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it’s to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?” “I do,” Dunbar told him. “Why?” Clevinger asked. “What else is there?

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you wanna do with your life; the most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives; some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don’t.

A 22-year-old woman who spends six months backpacking across Asia sends a powerful message about her curiosity, open-mindedness, and even courage. Similar (if weaker) signals can be bought for less time and money simply by eating strange foods, watching foreign films, and reading widely.

Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily. Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It’s five-tens-nine.

The teenage lead singer counted off, and the band launched into a hot version of “Ooh, My Head,” the old Ritchie Valens song—and not really so old in the summer of ’61, although Valens had been dead for almost two years.

Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't.

Here is Abraham Lincoln’s touching condolence letter to 22-year-old Fanny McCullough, the daughter of a long-time friend: “Dear Fanny It is with deep grief that I learn of the death of your kind and brave Father; and, especially, that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it. I am anxious to afford some alleviation of your present distress. Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You can not now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say; and you need only to believe it, to feel better at once. The memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer and holier sort than you have known before. Please present my kind regards to your afflicted mother. Your sincere friend, A. Lincoln

22. Why can’t you say a joke while standing on ice? Because it might crack up!

As Tim followed me up the narrow stairwell, he playfully pinched my butt with every step, a pleasant (and painful--in a black-and-blue sort of way) reminder that all I had yearned for as a student twenty-five years before had come true, even if I hadn't taken the time to notice it until now: I was happy. At twenty years old, had I articulated what I thought I needed in life, I would have probably said a big house, a successful husband, and a great career. Yet all I really needed for true happiness was the homeless, unemployed bus driver right behind me, pinching my butt every step of the way.

Dimitri Tirunul was her unexpected miracle. A man beyond any she’d ever dreamt of. She was human. He was Carpathian— nearly immortal. She was nineteen years old. He was an ancient, centuries old. She held the other half of his soul, the light to his darkness. Without her, he would not survive. She was his lifemate— his savior. Yet she knew just the opposite was true— Dimitri was the one saving her.

I picked up an old microscope at a flea market in Verona. In the long evenings, in my imitation of life science, I set up in the courtyard and examined local specimens. Pointless pleasure, stripped of ends. The ancient contadino from across the road, long since convinced that we were mad, could not resist coming over for a look. I showed him where to put his eye. I watched him, thinking, this is how we attach to existence. We look through awareness’s tube and see the swarm at the end of the scope, taking what we come upon there for the full field of sight itself. The old man lifted his eye from the microscope lens, crying. Signore, ho ottantotto anni e non ho mai Saputo prima che cosa ci fosse in una goccia d’acqua. I’m eighty-eight years old and I never knew what was in a droplet of water.

Now this girl was about twenty-one years old. A sweet little coed. Spends a night with a married man. Goes home the next day and tells her mama and daddy. Don’t ask me why. Maybe just to rub their faces in it. They decide she needs a lesson. Whole family drives out into the desert, right out to that spot we just passed. All three of them plus the girl’s pet dog. Papa tells the girl to dig a shallow grave. Mama gets down on her hands and knees and holds the dog by the collar. When the girl is all through digging, papa gives her a .22 caliber revolver and tells her to shoot the dog. A real touching family scene. Make a good calendar for some religious group to give away. The girl puts the weapon to her temple and kills herself. Now isn’t that a heartwarming story? Restores my faith in just about everything.

Damaged little girls are exactly what the porn industry preys upon and depends upon. It is estimated that 90% of porn performers are sexual abuse survivors and the average age of a porn actress is 22.8 years old.

The universe today is 13.8 billion years old. By 22 billion years, the Sun will have finished its main-sequence lifetime and will have become a white dwarf. The Andromeda galaxy will have crashed into the Milky Way.

More than 2,000 books are dedicated to how Warren Buffett built his fortune. Many of them are wonderful. But few pay enough attention to the simplest fact: Buffett’s fortune isn’t due to just being a good investor, but being a good investor since he was literally a child. As I write this Warren Buffett’s net worth is $84.5 billion. Of that, $84.2 billion was accumulated after his 50th birthday. $81.5 billion came after he qualified for Social Security, in his mid-60s. Warren Buffett is a phenomenal investor. But you miss a key point if you attach all of his success to investing acumen. The real key to his success is that he’s been a phenomenal investor for three quarters of a century. Had he started investing in his 30s and retired in his 60s, few people would have ever heard of him. Consider a little thought experiment. Buffett began serious investing when he was 10 years old. By the time he was 30 he had a net worth of $1 million, or $9.3 million adjusted for inflation.16 What if he was a more normal person, spending his teens and 20s exploring the world and finding his passion, and by age 30 his net worth was, say, $25,000? And let’s say he still went on to earn the extraordinary annual investment returns he’s been able to generate (22% annually), but quit investing and retired at age 60 to play golf and spend time with his grandkids. What would a rough estimate of his net worth be today? Not $84.5 billion. $11.9 million. 99.9% less than his actual net worth. Effectively all of Warren Buffett’s financial success can be tied to the financial base he built in his pubescent years and the longevity he maintained in his geriatric years. His skill is investing, but his secret is time. That’s how compounding works. Think of this another way. Buffett is the richest investor of all time. But he’s not actually the greatest—at least not when measured by average annual returns.

How much older can you be at your age? A half minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unhooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise. Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon. Zip! They go rocketing by so fast.

My birth certificate says: Female Negro Mother: Mary Anne Irby, 22, Negro Father: Jack Austin Woodson, 25, Negro In Birmingham, Alabama, Martin Luther King Jr. is planning a march on Washington, where John F. Kennedy is president. In Harlem, Malcolm X is standing on a soapbox talking about a revolution. Outside the window of University Hospital, snow is slowly falling. So much already covers this vast Ohio ground. In Montgomery, only seven years have passed since Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus. I am born brown-skinned, black-haired and wide-eyed. I am born Negro here and Colored there and somewhere else, the Freedom Singers have linked arms, their protests rising into song: Deep in my heart, I do believe that we shall overcome someday. and somewhere else, James Baldwin is writing about injustice, each novel, each essay, changing the world. I do not yet know who I’ll be what I’ll say how I’ll say it . . . Not even three years have passed since a brown girl named Ruby Bridges walked into an all-white school. Armed guards surrounded her while hundreds of white people spat and called her names. She was six years old. I do not know if I’ll be strong like Ruby. I do not know what the world will look like when I am finally able to walk, speak, write . . . Another Buckeye! the nurse says to my mother. Already, I am being named for this place. Ohio. The Buckeye State. My fingers curl into fists, automatically This is the way, my mother said, of every baby’s hand. I do not know if these hands will become Malcolm’s—raised and fisted or Martin’s—open and asking or James’s—curled around a pen. I do not know if these hands will be Rosa’s or Ruby’s gently gloved and fiercely folded calmly in a lap, on a desk, around a book, ready to change the world . . .

Butterfly effect.” “Right. It means small events can have large, whatchamadingit, ramifications. The idea is that if some guy kills a butterfly in China, maybe forty years later—or four hundred—there’s an earthquake in Peru. That sound as crazy to you as it does to me?” It did, but I remembered a hoary old time-travel paradox and pulled it out. “Yeah, but what if you went back and killed your own grandfather?” He stared at me, baffled. “Why the fuck would you do that?” That was a good question, so I just told him to go on.

The countryside is beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like it. Thatched roofs on the houses. Snow everywhere, the sky is so blue. I’m 22 years old today.

Our Chasers Aren’t Cheating! That was the stunned reaction of Quidditch fans across Britain last night when the so-called “Stooging Penalty” was announced by the Department of Magical Games and Sports last night. “Instances of stooging have been on the increase,” said a harassed-looking Departmental representative last night. “We feel that this new rule will eliminate the sever Keeper injuries we have been seeing only too often. From now on, one Chaser will attempt to beat the Keeper, as opposed to three Chasers beating the Keeper up. Everything will be much cleaner and fairer.” At this point the Departmental representative was forced to retreat as the angry crowd started to bombard him with Quaffles. Wizards from the Department of Magical Law Enforcement arrived to disperse the crowd, who were threatening to stooge the Minister of Magic himself. One freckle-faced six-year-old left the hall in tears. “I loved stooging,” he sobbed to the Daily Prophet. “Me and me dad like watching them Keepers flattened. I don’t want to go to Quidditch no more.” Daily Prophet, 22 June 1884

Do you know how long a year takes when it's going away?' Dunbar repeated to Clevinger. 'This long.' He snapped his fingers. 'A second ago you were stepping into college with your lungs full of fresh air. Today you're an old man.

This story is about Howard Beale, who was the news anchorman on UBS TV. In his time, Howard Beale had been a mandarin of television, the grand old man of news, with a HUT rating of 16 and a 28 audience share. In 1969, however, his fortunes began to decline. He fell to a 22 share. The following year, his wife died, and he was left a childless widower with an 8 rating and a 12 share. He became morose and isolated, began to drink heavily, and on September 22, 1975, he was fired, effective in two weeks.

A recognisable picture of a spoilt 22-year-old girl experiencing her first love affair, knowing that she is infatuated with a totally unsuitable man who will alienate her friends and eventually cause herself serious damage, yet determined to press ahead whatever the cost.

It doesn't happen to me anymore, because a fresh generation of Africans and Asians has arisen to take over the business, but in my early years in Washington, D.C., I would often find myself in the back of a big beat-up old cab driven by an African-American veteran. I became used to the formalities of the mise-en-scène: on some hot and drowsy Dixie-like afternoon I would flag down a flaking Chevy. Behind the wheel, leaning wa-aay back and relaxed, often with a cigar stub in the corner of his mouth (and, I am not making this up, but sometimes also with a genuine porkpie hat on the back of his head) would be a grizzled man with the waist of his pants somewhere up around his armpits. I would state my desired destination. In accordance with ancient cabdriver custom, he would say nothing inresponse but simply engage the stickshift on his steering wheel and begin to cruise in a leisurely fashion. There would be a pause. Then: 'You from England?' I would always try to say something along the lines of 'Well, I'm in no position to deny it.' This occasionally got me a grin; in any case, I always knew what was coming next. 'I was there once.' 'Were you in the service?' 'I sure was.' 'Did you get to Normandy?' 'Yes, sir.' But it wasn't Normandy or combat about which they wanted to reminisce. (With real combat veterans, by the way, it almost never is.) It was England itself. 'Man did it know how to rain… and the warm beer. Nice people, though. Real nice.' I would never forget to say, as I got out and deliberately didn't overtip (that seeming a cheap thing to do), how much this effort on their part was remembered and appreciated.

I was extremely shy of approaching my hero but he, as I found out, was sorely in need of company. By then almost completely blind, he was claustrated and even a little confused and this may help explain the rather shocking attitude that he took to the blunt trauma that was being inflicted in the streets and squares around him. 'This was my country and it might be yet,' he intoned to me when the topic first came up, as it had to: 'But something came between it and the sun.' This couplet he claimed (I have never been able to locate it) was from Edmund Blunden, whose gnarled hand I had been so excited to shake all those years ago, but it was not the Videla junta that Borges meant by the allusion. It was the pre-existing rule of Juan Perón, which he felt had depraved and corrupted Argentine society. I didn't disagree with this at all—and Perón had victimized Borges's mother and sister as well as having Borges himself fired from his job at the National Library—but it was nonetheless sad to hear the old man saying that he heartily preferred the new uniformed regime, as being one of 'gentlemen' as opposed to 'pimps.' This was a touch like listening to Evelyn Waugh at his most liverish and bufferish. (It was also partly redeemed by a piece of learned philology or etymology concerning the Buenos Aires dockside slang for pimp: canfinflero. 'A canfinfla, you see,' said Borges with perfect composure, 'is a pussy or more exactly a cunt. So a canfinflero is a trafficker in cunt: in Anglo-Saxon we might say a 'cunter."' Had not the very tango itself been evolved in a brothel in 1880? Borges could talk indefinitely about this sort of thing, perhaps in revenge for having had an oversolicitous mother who tyrannized him all his life.)

As children', wrote Alice Raikes (Mrs. Wilson Fox) in The Times, January 22, 1932, 'we lived in Onslow Square and used to play in the garden behind the houses. Charles Dodgson used to stay with an old uncle there, and walk up and down, his hands behind him, on the strip of lawn. One day, hearing my name, he called me to him saying, "So you are another Alice. I'm very found of Alices. Would you like to come and see something which is rather puzzling?" We followed him into his house which opened, as ours did, upon the garden, into a room full of furniture with a tall mirror standing across one corner.' "Now", he said giving me an orange, "first tell me which hand you have got that in." "The right" I said. "Now", he said, "go and stand before that glass, and tell me which hand the little girl you see there has got it in." After some perplexed contemplation, I said, "The left hand." "Exactly," he said, "and how do you explain that?" I couldn't explain it, but seeing that some solution was expected, I ventured, "If I was on the other side of the glass, wouldn't the orange still be in my right hand?" I can remember his laugh. "Well done, little Alice," he said. "The best answer I've heard yet." "I heard no more then, but in after years was told that he said that had given him his first idea for Through the Looking-Glass, a copy of which, together with each of his other books, he regularly sent me.

23 Emotions people feel, but can’t explain 1.    Sonder: The realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own. 2.    Opia: The ambiguous intensity of Looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable. 3.    Monachopsis: The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place. 4.    Énouement: The bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self. 5.    Vellichor: The strange wistfulness of used bookshops. 6.    Rubatosis: The unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat. 7.    Kenopsia: The eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet. 8.    Mauerbauertraurigkeit: The inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends who you really like. 9.    Jouska: A hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head. 10.    Chrysalism: The amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm. 11.    Vemödalen: The frustration of photographic something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist. 12.    Anecdoche: A conversation in which everyone is talking, but nobody is listening 13.    Ellipsism: A sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out. 14.    Kuebiko: A state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence. 15.    Lachesism: The desire to be struck by disaster – to survive a plane crash, or to lose everything in a fire. 16.    Exulansis: The tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it. 17.    Adronitis: Frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone. 18.    Rückkehrunruhe: The feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness. 19.    Nodus Tollens: The realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore. 20.    Onism: The frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time. 21.    Liberosis: The desire to care less about things. 22.    Altschmerz: Weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had – the same boring flaws and anxieties that you’ve been gnawing on for years. 23.    Occhiolism: The awareness of the smallness of your perspective. John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (Simon & Schuster, November 16, 2021)

I want to be known as the 23 year-old who is foolishly in love with a Prince she can't see. I want to rejoice while holding the rose of singleness, even when my hands bleed from its thorns. I want to resist the urge to envy the pairs growing in the middle of my neighbors' gardens. I want to be rooted in the simple truth that unripen pairs taste like lies and lingering loneliness. 
I want to put Jesus on my bullet wound and cling to His heart wrenching hope because He was kind enough to be a Band-Aid when He should have stayed a King.

together with, along with. With in both expressions is a preposition, not a conjunction, and therefore does not govern the verb. This sentence is wrong: ‘They said the man, a motor mechanic, together with a 22-year-old arrested a day earlier, were being questioned’ (The Times). Make it ‘was being questioned’. A separate danger with such expressions is seen here: ‘Barbara Tuchman, the historian, gave $20,000 to the Democrats, along with her husband, Lester’ (The New York Times). How Lester felt about being given to the Democrats wasn’t recorded.

financial markets will become divorced from reality — you can count on that. More Jimmy Lings will appear. They will look and sound authoritative. The press will hang on their every word. Bankers will fight for their business. What they are saying will recently have “worked.” Their early followers will be feeling very clever. Our suggestion: Whatever their line, never forget that 2+2 will always equal 4. And when someone tells you how old-fashioned that math is ---zip up your wallet, take a vacation and come back in a few years to buy stocks at cheap prices.

My several years in the word game have learnt me several rules: (1) Avoid alliteration. Always (2) Prepositions are not words to end sentences with. (3) Avoid clichés like the plague. (They're old hat.) (4) Employ the vernacular. (5) Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc. (6) Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary. (7) It is wrong to ever split an infinitive. (8) Contractions aren't necessary. (9) Foreign words and phrases are not apropos. (10) One should never generalize. (11) Eliminate quotations. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." (12) Comparisons are as bad as clichés. (13) Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous. (14) Profanity sucks. (15) Be more or less specific. (16) Understatement is always best. (17) Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement. (18) One-word sentences? Eliminate. (19) Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake. (20) The passive voice is to be avoided. (21) Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms. (22) Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed. (23) Who needs rhetorical questions?

It’s in the face of this expression that I remember something I’ve always known. Not learned. Known. Far from cataloging the state of your breasts, or your hips, or your tummy, men are mostly just thrilled you’ve taken off your clothes at all. Women’s bodies are beautiful. Truly. All of them. The amount of energy that has gone into convincing us otherwise is extraordinary and telling. The fact I am currently being reminded of this by a thirty-year-old man with bulging arms and a washboard stomach—that I need to be reminded of this by a man—feels like a somewhat problematic catch-22 that I imagine has been explored in a number of highly respected feminist books I have not read.

Charlie Pop is 15 years old. He has 2 dogs: Bruno and Rex. He lives with his parents Kath and Ron. Today is the 22nd April 2025. Charlie and his friends have been going to the Landfawcett space bowling club all their lives. Charlie’s friends are called Harry Em, Eric Tweet, Paul Key, Robert Storm, Chris Leaf, Jay Laugh, Darren Rain and Tom Breeze. They all have short hair and dress casually especially Ben Steps and George Sing. Jake Train is the cleverest of them all. He has invented a secret waterproof wireless finger camera that takes photographs; it is attached to Charlie and his friend’s fingers. Rex and Bruno have a camera attached to the fur on their heads. Images are shared with each other from the app recording onto their phones and laptops. It is their space bowling tournament today.

I was the bitch who sat behind a desk and ignored you when you walked into the gallery, a pouty knockout wearing indecipherably cool avant-garde outfits. I was told to play dumb if anyone asked a question. Evade, evade. Never hand over a price list. Natasha paid me just $22,000 a year. Without my inheritance, I would have been forced to find a job that paid more money. And I would probably have had to live in Brooklyn, with roommates. I was lucky to have my dead parents’ money, I knew, but that was also depressing. Natasha’s star artist was Ping Xi, a pubescent-looking twenty-three-year-old from Diamond Bar, California. She thought he was a good investment because he was Asian American and had been kicked out of CalArts for firing a gun in his studio. He would add a certain cachet. “I want the gallery to get more cerebral,” she explained.

Voyages from Montreal to the Frozen and Pacific Ocean had been written by a Scottish fur trader, from Stornoway in the Scottish Outer Hebrides, named Alexander Mackenzie. Or more accurately, Sir Alexander Mackenzie—since King George III had awarded him a knighthood for becoming the first white man ever to cross the entirety of North America. Mackenzie had completed his voyage almost nine years earlier. He suspected that his seven-month overland journey to the Pacific was probably of historic moment, and so he had left a memorial. He had created what he hoped would be a lasting inscription on a tiny sea-washed rock near the present-day British Columbia fishing village of Bella Coola: “Alex. MacKenzie, from Canada by land. 22nd July, 1793.” He had inscribed the message with his finger, using an old trappers’ trick for long-duration messages, dipping it into a poultice made of bear grease mixed with vermilion powder and smearing out words that he hoped would survive the cold and lashing rains for which the Pacific coast is notorious.

Her collections matured, categorized methodically by order, genus, and species; by age according to bone wear; by size in millimeters of feathers; or by the most fragile hues of greens. The science and art entwined in each other’s strengths: the colors, the light, the species, the life; weaving a masterpiece of knowledge and beauty that filled every corner of her shack. Her world. She grew with them—the trunk of the vine—alone, but holding all the wonders together. But just as her collection grew, so did her loneliness. A pain as large as her heart lived in her chest. Nothing eased it. Not the gulls, not a splendid sunset, not the rarest of shells. Months turned into a year. The lonely became larger than she could hold. She wished for someone’s voice, presence, touch, but wished more to protect her heart. Months passed into another year. Then another. PART 2 The Swamp 22. Same Tide 1965 Nineteen years old, legs longer, eyes larger and seemingly blacker, Kya sat on Point Beach, watching sand crabs bury themselves backward into the swash.

Butterfly effect.” “Right. It means small events can have large, whatchamadingit, ramifications. The idea is that if some guy kills a butterfly in China, maybe forty years later—or four hundred—there’s an earthquake in Peru. That sound as crazy to you as it does to me?” It did, but I remembered a hoary old time-travel paradox and pulled it out. “Yeah, but what if you went back and killed your own grandfather?” He stared at me, baffled. “Why the fuck would you do that?” That was a good question, so I just told him to go on. “You changed the past this afternoon in all sorts of little ways, just by walking into the Kennebec Fruit . . . but the stairs leading up into the pantry and back into 2011 were still there, weren’t they? And The Falls is the same as when you left it.” “So it seems, yes. But you’re talking about something a little more major. To wit, saving JFK’s life.” “Oh, I’m talking about a lot more than that, because this ain’t some butterfly in China, buddy. I’m also talking about saving RFK’s life, because if John lives in Dallas, Robert

Many iGen’ers are so addicted to social media that they find it difficult to put down their phones and go to sleep when they should. “I stay up all night looking at my phone,” admits a 13-year-old from New Jersey in American Girls. She regularly hides under her covers at night, texting, so her mother doesn’t know she’s awake. She wakes up tired much of the time, but, she says, “I just drink a Red Bull.” Thirteen-year-old Athena told me the same thing: “Some of my friends don’t go to sleep until, like, two in the morning. “I assume just for summer?” I asked. “No, school, too,” she said. “And we have to get up at six forty-five.” Smartphone use may have decreased teens’ sleep time: more teens now sleep less than seven hours most nights (see Figure 4.12). Sleep experts say that teens should get about nine hours of sleep a night, so a teen who is getting less than seven hours a night is significantly sleep deprived. Fifty-seven percent more teens were sleep deprived in 2015 than in 1991. In just the three years between 2012 and 2015, 22% more teens failed to get seven hours of sleep.

MARCH 22 Eostre RENEWAL Eostre (YO-ster) is the Germanic goddess of spring. She is also called Ostara or Eastre, and her name is the origin of the word Easter, the name of the only feast day in the Christian calendar that is still tied to the moon. Eostre is a goddess of dawn, rebirth, and new beginnings. Her festival is celebrated on the first day of spring, when she is invoked at dawn with ritual fire, quickening the land, while the full moon symbolically sets behind her. Eostre’s return each spring warms the ground, preparing for a new cycle of growth. One year the goddess was late, and a little girl found a bird near death from the cold. The child turned to Eostre for help. In response a rainbow bridge appeared and Eostre came, clothed in her red robe of vibrant sunlight, melting the snows. Because the creature was wounded beyond repair, Eostre changed it into a snow hare, who then brought gifts of rainbow eggs. Hares and rainbows are sacred to her, as is the full moon, since the ancients saw the image of a hare in its markings. CONTEMPLATION Sometimes, old forms must be surrendered gracefully in order for life to be reborn in new and higher forms.

H-22: Father Corby Monument 39º48.205’N, 77º14.063’W This monument honors the hundreds of chaplains present on the field in 1863. As chaplain of the Eighty-eighth New York Infantry of the famed Irish Brigade, Father William Corby, twenty-nine years old, has become as famous as many of those who actually bore arms those three fateful days. As the Irish Brigade formed up to enter the fight, Father Corby stepped onto a boulder—some historians believe the very boulder on which the monument stands—and raised his hand. Three hundred soldiers drew silent, many of them dropping to their knees, as the battle raged around them. The priest blessed them, prayed for their safety, and granted a general absolution, after which the troops marched into the fight. Corby’s admonition that the church would refuse a Christian burial for any man who failed to do his duty that day rang in their ears as they headed off. Following the war, Father Corby became president of the University of Notre Dame. A replica of this monument stands on the university’s campus, marking his grave. Years after the war, veterans of the Irish Brigade petitioned to have the Medal of Honor awarded to Corby, a request that was ultimately denied.

[…] if sophistication is the ability to put a smile on one's existential desperation, then the fear of a glossy sheen is actually the fear that surface equals depth. *** […] we wake up, we do something—anything—we go to sleep, and we repeat it about 22,000 more times, and then we die. *** Part of our new boredom is that our brain doesn't have any downtime. Even the smallest amount of time not being engaged creates a spooky sensatino that maybe you're on the wrong track. Reboot your computer and sit there waiting for it to do its thing, and within seventeen seconds you experience a small existential implosion when you remember that fifteen years ago life was nothing but this kind of moment. Gosh, mabe I'll read a book. Or go for a walk. Sorry. Probably not going to happen. Hey, is that the new trailer for Ex Machina? *** In the 1990s there was that expression, "Get a life!" You used to say it to people who were overly fixating on some sort of minutia or detail or thought thread, and by saying, "Get a life," you were trying to snap them out of their obsession and get them to join the rest of us who are still out in the world, taking walks and contemplating trees and birds. The expression made sense at the time, but it's been years since I've heard anyone use it anywhere. What did it mean then, "getting a life"? Did we all get one? Or maybe we've all not got lives anymore, and calling attention to one person without a life would put the spotlight on all of humanity and our now full-time pursuit of minutia, details and tangential idea threads. *** I don't buy lottery tickets because they spook me. If you buy a one-in-fifty-million chance to win a cash jackpoint, you're simultaneously tempting fate and adding all sorts of other bonus probabilities to your plance of existence: car crashes, random shootings, being struck by a meteorite. Why open a door that didn't need opening? *** I read something last week and it made sense to me: people want other people to do well in life but not too well. I've never won a raffle or prize or lottery draw, and I can't help but wonder how it must feel. One moment you're just plain old you, and then whaam, you're a winner and now everyone hates you and wants your money. It must be bittersweet. You hear all those stories about how big lottery winners' lives are ruined by winning, but that's not an urban legend. It's pretty much the norm. Be careful what you wish for and, while you're doing so, be sure to use the numbers between thirty-two and forty-nine.

This, of course, gives rise to the argument of the invalidation of the Old Testament with the coming of the New, the idea being that the actions of Jesus were so antithesis to the “laws” prescribed in Exodus and Leviticus that the modern Christian should base the standards of his doctrine on the teaching of the son of their god instead. There are several large flaws with this reasoning, my favorite being the most obvious: no one does it, and if they did, what would be the point of keeping the Old Testament? How many Christian sermons have been arched around Old Testament verses, or signs waved at protests and marches bearing Leviticus 18:22, etc? Where stands the basis for the need to splash the Decalogue of Exodus in public parks and in school rooms, or the continuous reference of original sin and the holiness of the sabbath (which actually has two distinctly different definitions in the Old Testament)? A group of people as large as the Christian nation cannot possibly hope to avoid the negative reaction of Old Testament nightmares (e.g. genocide, rape, and infanticide, amongst others) by claiming it shares no part of their modern doctrine when, in actuality, it overflows with it. Secondly, one must always remember that the New Testament is in constant coherence with proving the prophecy of the Old Testament, continuously referring to: “in accordance with the prophet”, etc., etc., ad nauseum—the most important of which coming from the words of Jesus himself: “Do not think I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish but to fulfill. Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest part or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place.” (Matthew 5:17) And even this is hypocritical, considering how many times Jesus himself stood in the way of Mosaic law, most notably against the stoning of the woman taken by the Pharisees for adultery, the punishment of which should have resulted in her death by prophetic mandate of the Old Testament despite the guilt that Jesus inflicted upon her attackers (a story of which decent evidence has been discovered by Bart Ehrman and others suggesting that it wasn’t originally in the Gospel of John in the first place [7]). All of this, of course, is without taking into account the overwhelming pile of discrepancies that is the New Testament in whole, including the motivation for the holy family to have been in Bethlehem versus Nazareth in the first place (the census that put them there or the dream that came to Joseph urging him to flee); the first three Gospels claim that the Eucharist was invented during Passover, but the Fourth says it was well before, and his divinity is only seriously discussed in the Fourth; the fact that Herod died four years before the Current Era; the genealogy of Jesus in the line of David differs in two Gospels as does the minutiae of the Resurrection, Crucifixion, and the Anointment—on top of the fact that the Gospels were written decades after the historical Jesus died, if he lived at all.

In the Old Testament, the Egyptian ruler during the period of Prophet Ibrahim (as) and Prophet Yusuf (as) are named "Pharaoh." However, this title was actually employed after the eras in which these two prophets lived. While addressing the Egyptian ruler at the time of Prophet Yusuf (as), the word "Al-Malik" in Arabic is used in the Qur'an: It refers to a ruler, king or sultan: The King said, ‘Bring him to me straight away!'… (Qur'an, 12:50) The ruler of Egypt in the time of Prophet Musa (as) is referred to as "Pharaoh." This distinction in the Qur'an is not made in the Old and New Testaments nor by Jewish historians. In the Bible, the word "Pharaoh" is used, in every reference to an Egyptian monarch. On the other hand, the Qur'an is far more concise and accurate in the terminology it employs. The use of the word "Pharaoh" in Egyptian history belongs only to the late period. This particular title began to be employed in the 14th century B.C., during the reign of Amenhotep IV. Prophet Yusuf (as) lived at least 200 years before that time. The Encyclopaedia Britannica says that the word "Pharaoh" was a title of respect used from the New Kingdom (beginning with the 18th dynasty; B.C. 1539-1292) until the 22nd dynasty (B.C. 945-730), after which this term of address became the title of the king. Further information on this Allah's Miracles in the Qur'an 291 subject comes from the Academic American Encyclopaedia, which states that the title of Pharaoh began to be used in the New Kingdom. As we have seen, the use of the word "Pharaoh" dates from a specific period in history. For that reason, the fact that the Qur'an distinguishes between the different Egyptian titles in different Egyptian eras is yet another proof that the Qur'an is Allah's word.

Then one evening he reached the last chapter, and then the last page, the last verse. And there it was! That unforgivable and unfathomable misprint that had caused the owner of the books to order them to be pulped. Now Bosse handed a copy to each of them sitting round the table, and they thumbed through to the very last verse, and one by one burst out laughing. Bosse was happy enough to find the misprint. He had no interest in finding out how it got there. He had satisfied his curiosity, and in the process had read his first book since his schooldays, and even got a bit religious while he was at it. Not that Bosse allowed God to have any opinion about Bellringer Farm’s business enterprise, nor did he allow the Lord to be present when he filed his tax return, but – in other respects – Bosse now placed his life in the hands of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. And surely none of them would worry about the fact that he set up his stall at markets on Saturdays and sold bibles with a tiny misprint in them? (‘Only ninety-nine crowns each! Jesus! What a bargain!’) But if Bosse had cared, and if, against all odds, he had managed to get to the bottom of it, then after what he had told his friends, he would have continued: A typesetter in a Rotterdam suburb had been through a personal crisis. Several years earlier, he had been recruited by Jehovah’s Witnesses but they had thrown him out when he discovered, and questioned rather too loudly, the fact that the congregation had predicted the return of Jesus on no less than fourteen occasions between 1799 and 1980 – and sensationally managed to get it wrong all fourteen times. Upon which, the typesetter had joined the Pentecostal Church; he liked their teachings about the Last Judgment, he could embrace the idea of God’s final victory over evil, the return of Jesus (without their actually naming a date) and how most of the people from the typesetter’s childhood including his own father, would burn in hell. But this new congregation sent him packing too. A whole month’s collections had gone astray while in the care of the typesetter. He had sworn by all that was holy that the disappearance had nothing to do with him. Besides, shouldn’t Christians forgive? And what choice did he have when his car broke down and he needed a new one to keep his job? As bitter as bile, the typesetter started the layout for that day’s jobs, which ironically happened to consist of printing two thousand bibles! And besides, it was an order from Sweden where as far as the typesetter knew, his father still lived after having abandoned his family when the typesetter was six years old. With tears in his eyes, the typesetter set the text of chapter upon chapter. When he came to the very last chapter – the Book of Revelation – he just lost it. How could Jesus ever want to come back to Earth? Here where Evil had once and for all conquered Good, so what was the point of anything? And the Bible… It was just a joke! So it came about that the typesetter with the shattered nerves made a little addition to the very last verse in the very last chapter in the Swedish bible that was just about to be printed. The typesetter didn’t remember much of his father’s tongue, but he could at least recall a nursery rhyme that was well suited in the context. Thus the bible’s last two verses plus the typesetter’s extra verse were printed as: 20. He who testifies to these things says, Surely I am coming quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus!21. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.22. And they all lived happily ever after.

In 2012, the U.S. government estimated that 660,000 Americans were using heroin and more than 3,000 dying of it every year because Mexico was boosting the supply.22 About a quarter of all people who try heroin will become dependent on it, according to government estimates,23 and the precise appeal of methamphetamine to Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel was that it was “ragingly addictive,” according to the New York Times.24 Forbes reports that there is “little doubt” that the heroin that killed Philip Seymour Hoffman came from Mexico.25 These aren’t “big city” problems: They’re Mexico-is-on-our-border problems. Missouri had 18 heroin overdose deaths in 2001; ten years later, there were 245.26 Heroin deaths in Minnesota shot from 3 to 98 between 1999 and 2013.27 Michigan saw fatal heroin overdoses surge from a few dozen a year in 2002 to more than 100 a year starting in 2009.28 In just one year, heroin-related fatalities in Connecticut nearly doubled, to 257 in 2013.29 Between 2007 and 2012, heroin use in the United States is estimated to have increased by almost 80 percent.30 And that’s just heroin. More than 40,000 Americans were killed from all illegal drug use in 2010, surpassing car accidents and shootings as a cause of death.31 The addicts who die may be the lucky ones. In 2001, a seventeen-year-old boy in New Jersey who scored 700 on the math SAT took a heroin overdose that left him unable to stand, walk, or bathe himself. His mother, a globetrotting executive with Citibank, was forced to quit her job and become his full-time caretaker. After a year of hospitalization and more than a decade of therapy, he still needs his mother to carry him to the toilet. He has no recollection of taking an overdose, but packets of heroin and marijuana were found stored in a secret compartment in his bedroom.32

THE OBEDIENCE GAME DUGGAR KIDS GROW UP playing the Obedience Game. It’s sort of like Mother May I? except it has a few extra twists—and there’s no need to double-check with “Mother” because she (or Dad) is the one giving the orders. It’s one way Mom and Dad help the little kids in the family burn off extra energy some nights before we all put on our pajamas and gather for Bible time (more about that in chapter 8). To play the Obedience Game, the little kids all gather in the living room. After listening carefully to Mom’s or Dad’s instructions, they respond with “Yes, ma’am, I’d be happy to!” then run and quickly accomplish the tasks. For example, Mom might say, “Jennifer, go upstairs to the girls’ room, touch the foot of your bed, then come back downstairs and give Mom a high-five.” Jennifer answers with an energetic “Yes, ma’am, I’d be happy to!” and off she goes. Dad might say, “Johannah, run around the kitchen table three times, then touch the front doorknob and come back.” As Johannah stands up she says, “Yes, sir, I’d be happy to!” “Jackson, go touch the front door, then touch the back door, then touch the side door, and then come back.” Jackson, who loves to play army, stands at attention, then salutes and replies, “Yes, sir, I’d be happy to!” as he goes to complete his assignment at lightning speed. Sometimes spotters are sent along with the game player to make sure the directions are followed exactly. And of course, the faster the orders can be followed, the more applause the contestant gets when he or she slides back into the living room, out of breath and pleased with himself or herself for having complied flawlessly. All the younger Duggar kids love to play this game; it’s a way to make practicing obedience fun! THE FOUR POINTS OF OBEDIENCE THE GAME’S RULES (MADE up by our family) stem from our study of the four points of obedience, which Mom taught us when we were young. As a matter of fact, as we are writing this book she is currently teaching these points to our youngest siblings. Obedience must be: 1. Instant. We answer with an immediate, prompt “Yes ma’am!” or “Yes sir!” as we set out to obey. (This response is important to let the authority know you heard what he or she asked you to do and that you are going to get it done as soon as possible.) Delayed obedience is really disobedience. 2. Cheerful. No grumbling or complaining. Instead, we respond with a cheerful “I’d be happy to!” 3. Thorough. We do our best, complete the task as explained, and leave nothing out. No lazy shortcuts! 4. Unconditional. No excuses. No, “That’s not my job!” or “Can’t someone else do it? or “But . . .” THE HIDDEN GOAL WITH this fun, fast-paced game is that kids won’t need to be told more than once to do something. Mom would explain the deeper reason behind why she and Daddy desired for us to learn obedience. “Mom and Daddy won’t always be with you, but God will,” she says. “As we teach you to hear and obey our voice now, our prayer is that ultimately you will learn to hear and obey what God’s tells you to do through His Word.” In many families it seems that many of the goals of child training have been lost. Parents often expect their children to know what they should say and do, and then they’re shocked and react harshly when their sweet little two-year-old throws a tantrum in the middle of the grocery store. This parental attitude probably stems from the belief that we are all born basically good deep down inside, but the truth is, we are all born with a sin nature. Think about it: You don’t have to teach a child to hit, scream, whine, disobey, or be selfish. It comes naturally. The Bible says that parents are to “train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6).

Even if the press were dying to report on the Hmong gang-rape spree, the police won’t tell them about it. A year before the Hmong gang rape that reminded the Times of a rape in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, the police in St. Paul issued a warning about gang rapists using telephone chat lines to lure girls out of their homes. Although the warning was issued only in Hmong, St. Paul’s police department refused to confirm to the St. Paul Pioneer Press that the suspects were Hmong, finally coughing up only the information that they were “Asian.”20 And the gang rapes continue. The Star Tribune counted nearly one hundred Hmong males charged with rape or forced prostitution from 2000 to June 30, 2005. More than 80 percent of the victims were fifteen or younger. A quarter of their victims were not Hmong.21 The police say many more Hmong rapists have gone unpunished—they have no idea how many—because Hmong refuse to report rape. Reporters aren’t inclined to push the issue. The only rapes that interest the media are apocryphal gang rapes committed by white men. Was America short on Hmong? These backward hill people began pouring into the United States in the seventies as a reward for their help during the ill-fated Vietnam War. That war ended forty years ago! But the United States is still taking in thousands of Hmong “refugees” every year, so taxpayers can spend millions of dollars on English-language and cultural-assimilation classes, public housing, food stamps, healthcare, prosecutors, and prisons to accommodate all the child rapists.22 By now, there are an estimated 273,000 Hmong in the United States.23 Canada only has about eight hundred.24 Did America lose a bet? In the last few decades, America has taken in more Hmong than Czechs, Danes, French, Luxembourgers, New Zealanders, Norwegians, or Swiss. We have no room for them. We needed to make room for a culture where child rape is the norm.25 A foreign gang-rape culture that blames twelve-year-old girls for their own rapes may not be a good fit with American culture, especially now that political correctness prevents us from criticizing any “minority” group. At least when white males commit a gang rape the media never shut up about it. The Glen Ridge gang rape occurred more than a quarter century ago, and the Times still thinks the case hasn’t been adequately covered.

May God’s people never eat rabbit or pork (Lev. 11:6–7)? May a man never have sex with his wife during her monthly period (Lev. 18:19) or wear clothes woven of two kinds of materials (Lev. 19:19)? Should Christians never wear tattoos (Lev. 19:28)? Should those who blaspheme God’s name be stoned to death (Lev. 24:10–24)? Ought Christians to hate those who hate God (Ps. 139:21–22)? Ought believers to praise God with tambourines, cymbals, and dancing (Ps. 150:4–5)? Should Christians encourage the suffering and poor to drink beer and wine in order to forget their misery (Prov. 31:6–7)? Should parents punish their children with rods in order to save their souls from death (Prov. 23:13–14)? Does much wisdom really bring much sorrow and more knowledge more grief (Eccles. 1:18)? Will becoming highly righteous and wise destroy us (Eccles. 7:16)? Is everything really meaningless (Eccles. 12:8)? May Christians never swear oaths (Matt. 5:33–37)? Should we never call anyone on earth “father” (Matt. 23:9)? Should Christ’s followers wear sandals when they evangelize but bring no food or money or extra clothes (Mark 6:8–9)? Should Christians be exorcising demons, handling snakes, and drinking deadly poison (Mark 16:15–18)? Are people who divorce their spouses and remarry always committing adultery (Luke 16:18)? Ought Christians to share their material goods in common (Acts 2:44–45)? Ought church leaders to always meet in council to issue definitive decisions on matters in dispute (Acts 15:1–29)? Is homosexuality always a sin unworthy of the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 6:9–10)? Should unmarried men not look for wives (1 Cor. 7:27) and married men live as if they had no wives (1 Cor. 7:29)? Is it wrong for men to cover their heads (1 Cor. 11:4) or a disgrace of nature for men to wear long hair (1 Cor. 11:14)? Should Christians save and collect money to send to believers in Jerusalem (1 Cor. 16:1–4)? Should Christians definitely sing psalms in church (Col. 3:16)? Must Christians always lead quiet lives in which they work with their hands (1 Thess. 4:11)? If a person will not work, should they not be allowed to eat (2 Thess. 3:10)? Ought all Christian slaves always simply submit to their masters (reminder: slavery still exists today) (1 Pet. 2:18–21)? Must Christian women not wear braided hair, gold jewelry, and fine clothes (1 Tim. 2:9; 1 Pet. 3:3)? Ought all Christian men to lift up their hands when they pray (1 Tim. 2:8)? Should churches not provide material help to widows who are younger than sixty years old (1 Tim. 5:9)? Will every believer who lives a godly life in Christ be persecuted (2 Tim. 3:12)? Should the church anoint the sick with oil for their healing (James 5:14–15)? The list of such questions could be extended.

Sunday, May 7, 1944 I should be deeply ashamed of myself, and I am. What's done can't be undone, but at least you can keep it from happening again...I'm not all that ugly, or that stupid, I have a sunny disposition, and I want to develop a good character! Monday, May 22, 1944 ...Could anyone, regardless of whether they're Jews or Christians, remain silent in the face of German pressure? Everyone knows it's practically impossible, so why do they ask the impossible of the Jews? Thursday, May 25, 1944 The world's been turned upside down. The most decent people are being sent to concentration camps, prisons and lonely cells, while the lowest of the low rule over young and old, rich and poor...Unless you're a Nazi, you don't know what's going to happen to you from one day to the next. ...We're going to be hungry, but nothing's worse than being caught. Friday, May 26, 1944 ...That gap, that enormous gap, is always there. One day we're laughing at the comical side of life in hiding, and the next day (there are many such days), we're frightened, and the fear, tension and despair can be read on our faces. ...But they also have their outings, their visits with friends, their everyday lives as ordinary people, so that the tension is sometimes relieved, if only for a short while, while ours never is, never has been, not once in the two years we've been here. How much longer will this increasingly oppressive, unbearable weight press down on us? ... ...What will we do if we're ever...no, I mustn't write that down. But the question won't let itself be pushed to the back of my mind today; on the contrary, all the fear I've ever felt is looming before me in all its horror. ... I've asked myself again and again whether it wouldn't have been better if we hadn't gone into hiding, if we were dead now and didn't have to go through this misery, especially so that the others could be spared the burden. But we all shrink from this thought. We still love life, we haven't yet forgotten the voice of nature, and we keep hoping, hoping for...everything. Let something happen soon, even an air raid. Nothing can be more crushing than this anxiety. Let the end come, however cruel; at least then we'll know whether we are to be victors or the vanquished. Tuesday, June 13, 1944 Is it because I haven't been outdoors for so long that I've become so smitten with nature? ... Many people think nature is beautiful, many people sleep from time to time under the starry sky, and many people in hospitals and prisons long for the day when they'll be free to enjoy what nature has to offer. But few are as isolated and cut off as we are from the joys of nature, which can be shared by rich and poor alike. It's not just my imagination - looking at the sky, the clouds, the moon and the stars really does make me feel calm and hopeful. It's much better medicine than Valerian or bromide. Nature makes me feel humble and ready to face every blow with courage! ...Nature is the one thing for which there is no substitute.

Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” Ladies and Gentlemen of the class of '99: Wear sunscreen. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now. Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth; oh never mind; you will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine. Don’t worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4:00 pm on some idle Tuesday. Do one thing everyday that scares you. Sing. Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts; don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours. Floss. Don’t waste your time on jealousy; sometimes you’re ahead; sometimes you’re behind; the race is long, and in the end it’s only with yourself. Remember compliments you receive; forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how. Keep your old love letters; throw away your old bank statements. Stretch. Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you wanna do with your life; the most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives; some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don’t. Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees; you’ll miss them when they’re gone. Maybe you’ll marry -- maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll have children -- maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll divorce at 40 -- maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either -- your choices are half chance; so are everybody else’s. Enjoy your body; use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it. It’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own. Dance. even if you have nowhere to do it but in your own living room. Read the directions, even if you don’t follow them. Do not read beauty magazines; they will only make you feel ugly. Get to know your parents; you never know when they’ll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings; they're your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future. Understand that friends come and go, but for the precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography, in lifestyle, because the older you get the more you need the people you knew when you were young. Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel. Accept certain inalienable truths: prices will rise; politicians will philander; you too will get old, and when you do you’ll fantasize that when you were young prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders. Respect your elders. Don’t expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund; maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse; but you never know when either one might run out. Don’t mess too much with your hair, or by the time you're 40, it will look 85. Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia: dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than it’s worth. But trust me on the sunscreen. Baz Luhrmannk, William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet (1996)

if there are many choices of 3.4 billion women/men in this world (2010 statistic: 65% from overall population or 2,2 billion are 15-64 years old women/men) , why should be narrowed with only view to the same beliefs ?

Boomers, the more than 76 million people born between 1946 and 1964, began turning 65 three years ago and all will have reached that age by 2030. All Millennials, the 82 million people born between 1981 and 2000, will have entered prime-working years - the age group from 25 to 55 - by the end of 2025. The group sandwiched in between, Generation X, is just 57 million people. The result: 25- to 34-year-olds will make up 22.5 percent of the workforce by 2022, compared with 21.6 percent in 2012, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates. The share of America's oldest employees, those over 55, will expand even faster - to 25.6 percent from 20.9 percent, led by people 65 and older.

REFERENCE RANGES FOR SERUM MAGNESIUM Category Normal Range Adult 1.8 to 2.6 mEq/L Child (2 to 18 years old) 1.7 to 2.1 mEq/L Infant 1.5 to 2.2 mEq/L

Beausoleil tried to distance himself from the Manson Family after he murdered Gary Hinman and drove to San Francisco, leaving his pregnant girlfriend, Kitty, behind. Beausoleil drove in one of the cars he had stolen from Hinman, the very car in which he had stashed the bloody knife. When the car broke down, police were called to the scene. They examined the car, quickly finding the knife. Police arrested Beausoleil and matched his fingerprints to those found at Hinman’s home. Beausoleil was booked for homicide, and on April 18, 1970, 22-year-old Beausoleil was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. When the California Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972, authorities commuted Beausoleil’s sentence to life in prison.

Soon after three o'clock on the afternoon of April 22nd 1973, a 35-year-old architect named Robert Maitland was driving down the high-speed exit lane of the Westway interchange in central London. Six hundred yards from the junction with the newly built spur of the M4 motorway, when the Jaguar had already passed the 70 m.p.h. speed limit, a blow-out collapsed the front nearside tyre. The exploding air reflected from the concrete parapet seemed to detonate inside Robert Maitland's skull. During the few seconds before his crash he clutched at the whiplashing spokes of the steering wheel, dazed by the impact of the chromium window pillar against his head. The car veered from side to side across the empty traffic lanes, jerking his hands like a puppet's. The shredding tyre laid a black diagonal stroke across the white marker lines that followed the long curve of the motorway embankment. Out of control, the car burst through the palisade of pinewood trestles that formed a temporary barrier along the edge of the road. Leaving the hard shoulder, the car plunged down the grass slope of the embankment. Thirty yards ahead, it came to a halt against the rusting chassis of an overturned taxi. Barely injured by this violent tangent that had grazed his life, Robert Maitland lay across his steering wheel, his jacket and trousers studded with windshield fragments like a suit of lights.

Allow me to clarify something, when I say running, I am referring to everything between a 7-minute mile to a 17-minute mile. Some may say that 17 and 18-minute miles are not running, try to tell that to the 75-year-old lady that just passed the 22-mile marker in a marathon. The key point here is being out there doing something, and the speed is not that important. Although I must add, it would be nice to get home sometime today.

A filmmaker made a short documentary about this happy-go-lucky teenager on death row, called My Last Days. It showed Zach living happily, hanging out with his family, and playing music. Everybody loved Zach. When you see the footage, you can’t help but like him. As you watch him laugh and love and sing, you catch yourself forgetting: this kid is about to die. Zach’s family tells the camera how knowing he would die has helped them realize what matters in life and to find true meaning. “It’s really simple, actually,” Zach says. “Just try and make people happy.” As the 22-minute film closes, Zach looks into the camera, smiling, and says, “I want to be remembered as the kid who went down fighting, and didn’t really lose.” Not long after he said those words, Zach passed away. When Eli Pariser and Peter Koechley of Upworthy saw the film, they thought, This is a story that needs to be heard. Now just over a year old, Upworthy has become quite popular. In fact, it recently hit 30 million monthly visitors, making it, according to the Business Insider, the fastest-growing media company in history.* (Seven-year-old BuzzFeed was serving 50 million monthly visitors at the time.) The Zach Sobiech story illustrates how Upworthy used rapid feedback to do it: According to Upworthy’s calculations, My Last Days had the potential to reach a lot of people. But so far, few had seen it. The filmmaker had posted the documentary under the headline, “My Last Days: Meet Zach Sobiech.” Though descriptive, it was suboptimal packaging. In the ADD world of Facebook and Twitter, it’s no surprise that few people clicked. Upworthy reposted the video with a new title: “We Lost This Kid 80 Years Too Early. I’m Glad He Went Out with a Bang,” and shared it with a small number of its subscribers, then waited to see who clicked.

Entrances and Exits Between 4 million and 2 million years ago, at least 11 different hominid species existed in central, eastern, and southern Africa. These species fall into three genera: Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and Kenyanthropus. At any given time during this era, from four to seven different species existed simultaneously.8 Paleoanthropologists surmise that at least six of the hominids were Australopithecus. Like earlier hominids, australopithecines can be thought of as bipedal apes, distinct from chimpanzees.9 The brain size of australopithecines (380 to 450 cm3) was slightly larger than that of chimpanzees (300 to 400 cm3). Though the cranium, facial features, and dental anatomy were apelike, they were distinct from the corresponding chimpanzee features. The australopithecines stood about four feet tall and matured rapidly, like the great apes. Skull, pelvis, and lower limbs all display features that indicate these hominids walked erect. Still, the bipedalism, called facultative, was distinct from the obligatory bipedalism employed by Homo hominids. Some paleoanthropologists think the australopithecines could also climb and move effectively through trees. This idea is based on their relatively long upper arms, short lower limbs, and funnel-shaped torsos. Work published in 2000 indicates that some australopithecines might have knuckle-walked like the great apes.10 The earliest australopithecines lived either in a woodland environment or in a mixed habitat of trees and open savannas. Later australopithecines lived only on the grassy plains. Their capacity to climb and move through trees, as well as walk erect, gave these hominids easy mobility in their varied environment. The oldest member of Australopithecus, Australopithecus anamensis, existed between 4.2 and 3.8 million years ago, based on fossils recovered near Lake Turkana in Kenya. Australopithecus afarensis fossils have been recovered in eastern Africa and date to between 4 and 3 million years old. “Lucy” (discovered in the early 1970s by Donald Johanson) is one of the best-known specimens. She is nearly 40 percent complete, with much of the postcranial skeleton intact.11 Remains of Australopithecus bahrelghazali, dated at 3.2 million years ago, have been recovered in Chad. Some paleoanthropologists think, however, that A. bahrelghazali is properly classified as an A. afarensis. Australopithecus africanus lived in South Africa between 3.0 and 2.2 million years ago, based on the fossil record. One of the best-known A. africanus specimens is the “Taung child” discovered in 1924 by Dart. The Taung child was the first australopithecine found.12

The town was relatively small. Beyond the sad side was a side maybe five years from going sad. Maybe more. Maybe ten. There was hope. There were some boarded-up enterprises, but not many. Most stores were still doing business, at a leisurely rural pace. Big pick-up trucks rolled through, slowly. There was a billiard hall. Not many street lights. It was getting dark. Something about the architecture made it clear it was dairy country. The shape of the stores looked like old-fashioned milking barns. The same DNA was in there somewhere.

I saw you coming.”   “You can see into the future?”   “Only partial glimpses. Nothing in full detail.”   “How is that possible?”   “I think it is due to my old age combined with years of meditating on top of this mound. Somehow, I've been blessed with the ability to see short glimpses of the future.”   “So, does that mean you don’t know everything?”   “That is correct. I don't have all the answers for you, but I can point you in the right direction, Chosen One.”   “Wait, what? What’s this about the Chosen One?”   “Ah, I should explain. Destiny has chosen you to be the Chosen One.”   “Uh… what does that mean?”   “It means you are the one that will save this world.”   “Uh… what?”   “This information must come as a surprise to you, so I understand if you need time to process it.”   “I, uh, don’t know about the saving the world thing…”   “But isn’t that your purpose? Isn’t that what drives you?”   “Um…

in line.”   I sighed and lowered my head. I turned around and was about to walk out the door.   Then the Sage started cracking up.   I turned back to look at him.   “I’m just playing with you. Come back here,” he said as he laughed.   “W-what? For real?” I walked slowly back to him.   “Yes, just because I’m old, it doesn’t mean I don’t know how to have fun.”   “Oh… uh, okay,” I said as I chuckled weakly.   “You must have many questions for me,” the Sage said.   “I do! But I’m only allowed to ask one question…”   The Sage smiled at me. “For you, I’ll make an exception.”   “W-what? Really?”   “Yes, we’ve already broken the no cutting rule for you.”   “Oh, er, thanks…”   “The truth is… I’ve been waiting for you. I knew that one day you would arrive,” said the Sage.   “You’ve been waiting for me? What do you mean?”   “I saw you coming.”   “You can see into the future?”   “Only partial glimpses. Nothing in full detail.”   “How is that possible?”   “I think it is due to my old age combined with years of meditating on top of this mound. Somehow, I've been blessed with the ability to see short glimpses of the future.”   “So, does that mean you don’t know everything?”   “That is correct. I don't have all the answers for you, but I can point you in the right direction, Chosen One.”   “Wait, what? What’s this about the Chosen One?”   “Ah, I should explain. Destiny has chosen you to be the Chosen One.”   “Uh… what does that mean?”   “It means you are the one that will save this world.”   “Uh… what?”   “This information must come as a surprise to you, so I understand if you need time to process it.”   “I, uh, don’t know about the saving the world thing…”   “But isn’t that your purpose? Isn’t that what drives you?”   “Um…

Known as “Leni,” Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl was born on August 22, 1902. During the Third Reich she was known throughout Germany as a close friend and confidant of the Adolf Hitler. Recognized as a strong swimmer and talented artist, she studied dancing as a child and performed across Europe until an injury ended her dancing career. During the 1920’s Riefenstahl was inspired to become an actress and starred in five motion pictures produced in Germany. By 1932 she directed her own film “Das Blaue Licht.” With the advent of the Hitler era she directed “Triumph des Willens” anf “Olympia” which became recognized as the most innovative and effective propaganda films ever made. Many people who knew of her relationship with Hitler insisted that they had an affair, although she persistently denied this. However, her relationship with Adolf Hitler tarnished her reputation and haunted her after the war. She was arrested and charged with being a Nazi sympathizer, but it was never proven that she was involved with any war crimes. Convinced that she had been infatuated and involved with the Führer, her reputation and career became totally destroyed. Her former friends shunned her and her brother, who was her last remaining relative, was killed in action on the “Eastern Front.” Seeing a bleak future “Leni” Riefenstahl left Germany, to live amongst the Nuba people in Africa. During this time Riefenstahl met and began a close friendship with Horst Kettner, who assisted her with her acknowledged brilliant photography. They became an item from the time she was 60 years old and he was 20. Together they wrote and produced photo books about the Nuba tribes and later filmed marine life. At that time she was one of the world's oldest scuba divers and underwater photographer. Leni Riefenstahl died of cancer on September 8, 2003 at her home in Pöcking, Germany and was laid to rest at the Munich Waldfriedhof.

The STAR WARS Novels Timeline OLD REPUBLIC 5000–33 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope Lost Tribe of the Sith* Precipice Skyborn Paragon Savior Purgatory Sentinel 3650 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope The Old Republic: Deceived Lost Tribe of the Sith* Pantheon Secrets Red Harvest The Old Republic: Fatal Alliance 1032 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope Knight Errant Darth Bane: Path of Destruction Darth Bane: Rule of Two Darth Bane: Dynasty of Evil RISE OF THE EMPIRE 33–0 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope Darth Maul: Saboteur* Cloak of Deception Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter 32 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope STAR WARS: EPISODE I: The Phantom Menace Rogue Planet Outbound Flight The Approaching Storm 22 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope STAR WARS: EPISODE II: Attack of the Clones 22–19 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope The Clone Wars The Clone Wars: Wild Space The Clone Wars: No Prisoners Clone Wars Gambit Stealth Siege Republic Commando Hard Contact Triple Zero True Colors Order 66 Shatterpoint The Cestus Deception The Hive* MedStar I: Battle Surgeons MedStar II: Jedi Healer Jedi Trial Yoda: Dark Rendezvous Labyrinth of Evil 19 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope STAR WARS: EPISODE III: Revenge of the Sith Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader Imperial Commando 501st Coruscant Nights Jedi Twilight Street of Shadows Patterns of Force The

Just down the street from Gildersleeve, in the next block, lived the widow Leila Ransom. In the second full year she became a pivotal character who on June 27, 1943, got Gildersleeve to the altar and to the last line of the wedding ceremony. The show had much of the appeal of a serial, a 30-minute sitcom whose episodes were connected—sometimes into storylines that ran for months—but were also complete in themselves. Gildersleeve’s romances were often at the crux of it: he was sued for breach of promise, got fired from his job, and ran for mayor—situations that each took up many shows. In a memorable sequence beginning Sept. 8, 1948, a baby was left in Gildersleeve’s car. This played out through the entire fall season, the baby becoming such a part of the family that Kraft ran a contest offering major prizes to the listener who could coin the child’s name. But in a teary finale, Dec. 22, the real father turned up and took the baby away.

Jim Simons, head of the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, has compounded money at 66% annually since 1988. No one comes close to this record. As we just saw, Buffett has compounded at roughly 22% annually, a third as much. Simons’ net worth, as I write, is $21 billion. He is—and I know how ridiculous this sounds given the numbers we’re dealing with—75% less rich than Buffett. Why the difference, if Simons is such a better investor? Because Simons did not find his investment stride until he was 50 years old. He’s had less than half as many years to compound as Buffett. If James Simons had earned his 66% annual returns for the 70-year span Buffett has built his wealth he would be worth—please hold your breath—sixty-three quintillion nine hundred quadrillion seven hundred eighty-one trillion seven hundred eighty billion seven hundred forty-eight million one hundred sixty thousand dollars.

But the biggest reason many people come to San Francisco is for the cheap and abundant drugs and the lax law enforcement. “I didn’t want that straight life,” said a thirty-two-year-old homeless man from Alabama. “I was after the candy—getting high, easy money, freedom, ladies, getting high some more.”20 “Some of these small towns, you stick out straightaway and they come for you. Someone makes a call and the cops get on your tail. You could be just walking down the road like anyone else, no cart, nothing, and they pick you up.”21 Said another, “Some of the things allowed to happen in San Francisco would never be permitted back home in Boston.”22

Soon we began to collect a little group of odd people who would drink with us every cocktail hour. Brigitte, who was a 22-year-old German, very beautiful, could have been on the cover of Stern magazine. Her boyfriend Volker was one of the most beautiful men I'd ever met - people said he looked like James Hunt, the English racecar driver. He was like Billy Budd. He was from Germany and had been a cowboy in Wyoming. Then there was Elford Elliot from England, who had something to do with producing garden gnomes. He was tripping on acid all the time and going out to Delos, this little island off Mykonos, chipping little pieces off the ancient ruins, which he then brought back in the pocket of his jumpsuit. Then there was Bryan, an IBM operator from Australia, who fancied himself as a kind of Oscar Wilde figure. I don't know why. The only story of his I remember was about some Australians who stole a garden gnome from the front lawn of a very elegant mansion and took it for a trip around the world. They would send postcards back to the owner saying things like, 'Having a lovely time in the Fiji Islands' and sign it, 'The Garden Gnome.' After six weeks, they brought the garden gnome back and left it on the lawn with little suitcases full of tiny clothing they'd knitted for it.

22. What would you get if you crossed a dog and a calculator? A friend you can count on!

As the days went by, Wilbur grew and grew. He ate three big meals a day. He spent long hours lying on his side, half asleep, dreaming pleasant dreams. He enjoyed good health and he gained a lot of weight. One afternoon, when Fern was sitting on the stool, the oldest sheep walked into the barn, and stopped to pay a call on Wilbur. 'Hello!' she said. 'Seems to me you're putting on weight.' 'Yes, I guess I am,' replied Wilbur. 'At my age it's a good idea to keep gaining.' 'Just the same, I don't envy you,' said the old sheep. 'You know why they're fattening you up, don't you?' 'No,' said Wilbur. 'Well, I don't like to spread bad news,' said the sheep, 'but they're fattening you up because they're going to kill you, that's why.' 'They're going to what?' screamed Wilbur. Fern grew rigid on her stool. 'Kill you. Turn you into smoked bacon and ham,' continued the old sheep. 'Almost all young pigs get murdered by the farmer as soon as the real cold weather sets in. There's a real conspiracy around here to kill you at Christmastime. Everybody is in the plot - Lurvy, Zuckerman, even John Arable.' 'Mr. Arable?' sobbed Wilbur. 'Fern's father?' 'Certainly. When a pig is to be butchered, everybody helps. I'm an old sheep and I see the same thing, same old business, year after year. Arable arrives with his .22, shoots the...' 'Stop!' screamed Wilbur. 'I don't want to die! Save me, somebody! Save me!' Fern was just about to jump up when a voice was heard. 'Be quiet, Wilbur!' said Charlotte, who had been listening to this awful conversation.

Proverbs 22:6 (KJV) Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it. ..and pray for the Holy Ghost for them. You have 12 whole years to do all that. After that let them alone and trust God and believe in the prayers. Stop being their Holy Ghost! Be a parent and a friend. If you can't love them as your children love them as sinners to win to Christ. Don't run them out of the presence of God with that attitude

Among the first to land was the 22-year-old Hieu Van Le, a future governor of South Australia.

Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) One of the distinguishing characteristics of Judaism, the religion of Jesus, is its sense of moral and social responsibility. After liberating the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt in the Exodus, God made explicit God's covenant with this people through Moses at Mount Sinai—“I am your God, and you are my people.” The primary conditions for being God's people were to worship God alone (monotheism and the prohibition of idolatry) and to create a just community (righteousness and justice). God insists that the Hebrews respect the rights and needs of the alien (or immigrant), the widow, and the orphan—that is, the marginal and vulnerable people—reminding them that they were once slaves in Egypt and that their God is the defender of the oppressed (Deut 24:17–18; 26:12–15; Ex 22:21–24; Jer 22:3).17 The laws regarding the forgiveness of debts during sabbatical years (Deut 15:1–11 and Lev 25:1–7) and the return to the original equality among the twelve tribes of Israel during the Jubilee year (Lev 25:8–17) symbolize the justice and community required of the Hebrew people.18 After the Hebrew people settled in the Promised Land, oppression came to characterize Israel. The God who had liberated the people from oppression in Egypt now sent prophets who called them to adhere to the requirements of the covenant or face the fate of the Egyptians—destruction. The Hebrew prophets (eighth century to sixth century B.C.E.), such as Amos, Micah, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, accused the people of infidelity to the covenant because of their idolatry and the social injustice they created.19 The warnings and the promises of the prophets remind each generation of God's passion for justice and God's faithful love. In Judaism, one's relationship with God (faith) affects one's relationship with others, the community, and the earth (justice).20 Faith and justice are relational, both personally and communally.

Among the many private initiatives in this field, the latest, launched in the summer of 2012, is aimed at middle-school female students in New York. Girls who Code is a seminar, hosted by a startup (AppNexus in 2012), where 13-17 year-old girls learn how to write software programs, design websites, and build applications. Mainly, they learn that these subjects are fun and accessible to them, and not only to male computer geeks. “Girls who Code is not just a program, it's a movement to close the sexist gap in the technological sector,” explained the program’s two organizers, Reshma Saujani and Kristen Titus, to attendees of a big gala that took place on the evening of Oct. 22, 2012 on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The occasion was to celebrate the success of the first edition of Girls Who Code and collect additional funds in support of the initiative. The first 20 “graduates” of the course spoke of their experience and their dreams for the future, while sitting at the gigantic table in the NYSE’s Board Room. Tomorrow, one of them could return as the CEO of a high-tech business, and perhaps ring the bell on the trading floor to inaugurate her company’s Initial Public Offering.

A Conference Board survey released in January of 2010 found that only 45 percent of workers surveyed were happy at their jobs, the lowest in 22 years of polling.2 Depression rates today are ten times higher than they were in 1960.3 Every year the age threshold of unhappiness sinks lower, not just at universities but across the nation. Fifty years ago, the mean onset age of depression was 29.5 years old. Today, it is almost exactly half that: 14.5 years old.

Filters out bacteria and parasites from the blood and lymph that have been killed by white blood cells. 5)      Acts as a reservoir for blood and platelets that can be released when needed (blood loss, infection, hemorrhage, and strenuous exercise). These are released via signals of epinephrine from the adrenals and sympathetics. It has been found that splenic tissue can sometimes regenerate after removal of the spleen. Howard Pearson at Yale University School of Medicine found that 13 of 22 children who had their spleens removed due to trauma had evidence of forming new splenic tissue within 1-8 years. It is hypothesized that a few old spleen cells left behind from the surgery triggered the regeneration.

I’m 22 years old and I didnae sail all the way ta Nova Scotia ta take shite offa you.

Josh Miller, 22 years old. He is co-founder of Branch, a “platform for chatting online as if you were sitting around the table after dinner.” Miller works at Betaworks, a hybrid company encapsulating a co-working space, an incubator and a venture capital fund, headquartered on 13th Street in the heart of the Meatpacking District. This kid in T-shirt and Bermuda shorts, and a potential star of the 2.0 version of Sex and the City, is super-excited by his new life as a digital neo-entrepreneur. He dropped out of Princeton in the summer of 2011 a year before getting his degree—heresy for the almost 30,000 students who annually apply to the prestigious Ivy League school in the hope of being among the 9% of applicants accepted. What made him decide to take such a big step? An internship in the summer of 2011 at Meetup, the community site for those who organize meetings in the flesh for like-minded people. His leader, Scott Heiferman, took him to one of the monthly meetings of New York Tech Meetup and it was there that Miller saw the light. “It was the coolest thing that ever happened to me,” he remembers. “All those people with such incredible energy. It was nothing like the sheltered atmosphere of Princeton.” The next step was to take part in a seminar on startups where the idea for Branch came to him. He found two partners –students at NYU who could design a website. Heartened by having won a contest for Internet projects, Miller dropped out of Princeton. “My parents told me I was crazy but I think they understood because they had also made unconventional choices when they were kids,” says Miller. “My father, who is now a lawyer, played drums when he was at college, and he and my mother, who left home at 16, traveled around Europe for a year. I want to be a part of the new creative class that is pushing the boundaries farther. I want to contribute to making online discussion important again. Today there is nothing but the soliloquy of bloggers or rude anonymous comments.” The idea, something like a public group email exchange where one can contribute by invitation only, interested Twitter cofounder Biz Stone and other California investors who invited Miller and his team to move to San Francisco, financing them with a two million dollar investment. After only four months in California, Branch returned to New York, where it now employs a dozen or so people. “San Francisco was beautiful and I learned a lot from Biz and my other mentors, but there’s much more adrenaline here,” explains Miller, who is from California, born and raised in Santa Monica. “Life is more varied here and creating a technological startup is something new, unlike in San Francisco or Silicon Valley where everyone’s doing it: it grabs you like a drug. Besides New York is the media capital and we’re an online publishing organization so it’s only right to be here.”[52]

The 49-year-old Bryant, who resembles a cereal box character himself with his wide eyes, toothy smile, and elongated chin, blames Kellogg's financial woes on the changing tastes of fickle breakfast eaters. The company flourished in the Baby Boom era, when fathers went off to work and mothers stayed behind to tend to three or four children. For these women, cereal must have been heaven-sent. They could pour everybody a bowl of Corn Flakes, leave a milk carton out, and be done with breakfast, except for the dishes. Now Americans have fewer children. Both parents often work and no longer have time to linger over a serving of Apple Jacks and the local newspaper. Many people grab something on the way to work and devour it in their cars or at their desks while checking e-mail. “For a while, breakfast cereal was convenience food,” says Abigail Carroll, author of Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal. “But convenience is relative. It's more convenient to grab a breakfast bar, yogurt, a piece of fruit, or a breakfast sandwich at some fast-food place than to eat a bowl of breakfast cereal.” People who still eat breakfast at home favor more laborintensive breakfasts, according to a recent Nielsen survey. They spend more time at the stove, preparing oatmeal (sales were up 3.5 percent in the first half of 2014) and eggs (up 7 percent last year). They're putting their toasters to work, heating up frozen waffles, French toast, and pancakes (sales of these foods were up 4.5 percent in the last five years). This last inclination should be helping Kellogg: It owns Eggo frozen waffles. But Eggo sales weren't enough to offset its slumping U.S. cereal numbers. “There has just been a massive fragmentation of the breakfast occasion,” says Julian Mellentin, director of food analysis at research firm New Nutrition Business. And Kellogg faces a more ominous trend at the table. As Americans become more healthconscious, they're shying away from the kind of processed food baked in Kellogg's four U.S. cereal factories. They tend to be averse to carbohydrates, which is a problem for a company selling cereal derived from corn, oats, and rice. “They basically have a carb-heavy portfolio,” says Robert Dickerson, senior packagedfood analyst at Consumer Edge. If such discerning shoppers still eat cereal, they prefer the gluten-free kind, sales of which are up 22 percent, according to Nielsen. There's also growing suspicion of packagedfood companies that fill their products with genetically modified organisms (GMOs). For these breakfast eaters, Tony the Tiger and Toucan Sam may seem less like friendly childhood avatars and more like malevolent sugar traffickers.

Which Country Has the Best Readers? One of the most comprehensive international reading studies was conducted by Warwick Elley for the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) in 1990 and 1991. Involving thirty-two countries, it assessed 210,000 nine- and fourteen-year-olds.22 Of all those children, which ones read best? For nine-year-olds, the four top nations were: Finland (569), the United States (547), Sweden (539), and France (531). But the U.S. position dropped to a tie for eighth when fourteen-year-olds were evaluated. This demonstrates that American children begin reading at a level that is among the best in the world, but since reading is an accrued skill and U.S. children appear to do less of it as they grow older, their scores decline when compared with countries where children read more as they mature.

At the time of our conversations, Chelsea Manning was 22 years of age - my own age when I made the choice to surrender to federal authorities ... I saw someone very familiar that day, and suddenly felt very old.

Howard Schultz, the man who built Starbucks into a colossus, isn’t so different from Travis in some ways.5.22 He grew up in a public housing project in Brooklyn, sharing a two-bedroom apartment with his parents and two siblings. When he was seven years old, Schultz’s father broke his ankle and lost his job driving a diaper truck. That was all it took to throw the family into crisis. His father, after his ankle healed, began cycling through a series of lower-paying jobs. “My dad never found his way,” Schultz told me. “I saw his self-esteem get battered. I felt like there was so much more he could have accomplished.” Schultz’s school was a wild, overcrowded place with asphalt playgrounds and kids playing football, basketball, softball, punch ball, slap ball, and any other game they could devise. If your team lost, it could take an hour to get another turn. So Schultz made sure his team always won, no matter the cost. He would come home with bloody scrapes on his elbows and knees, which his mother would gently rinse with a wet cloth. “You don’t quit,” she told him. His competitiveness earned him a college football scholarship (he broke his jaw and never played a game), a communications degree, and eventually a job as a Xerox salesman in New York City. He’d wake up every morning, go to a new midtown office building, take the elevator to the top floor, and go door-to-door, politely inquiring if anyone was interested in toner or copy machines. Then he’d ride the elevator down one floor and start all over again. By the early 1980s, Schultz was working for a plastics manufacturer when he noticed that a little-known retailer in Seattle was ordering an inordinate number of coffee drip cones. Schultz flew out and fell in love with the company. Two years later, when he heard that Starbucks, then just six stores, was for sale, he asked everyone he knew for money and bought it. That was 1987. Within three years, there were eighty-four stores; within six years, more than a thousand. Today, there are seventeen thousand stores in more than fifty countries.

Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It’s five-tens-nine.

Hold On Bless my heart, bless my soul. Didn't think I'd make it to 22 years old. There must be someone up above sayin', "Come on, Brittany, you got to come on up. You got to hold on... Hey, you got to hold on..." So, bless my heart and bless yours too. I don't know where I'm gonna go Don't know what I'm gonna do. There must be somebody up above sayin', "Come on, Brittany, you got to come on now! You got to hold on... Hey, you got to hold on..." "Yeah! You got to wait! Yeah! You got to wait!" But I don't wanna wait! No, I don't wanna wait... So, bless my heart and bless my mind. I got so much to do, I ain't got much time So, must be someone up above saying, "Come on, girl! Yeah, you got to get back up! You got to hold on... Yeah, you got to hold on..." "Yeah! You got to wait!" I don't wanna wait! But I don't wanna wait! No, I don't wanna wait! You got to hold on... You got to hold on... You got to hold on...

Psalm 119:57–64 The LORD is my portion; I have promised to keep Your words. I have sought Your favor with all my heart. Psalm 119:57–58 How would you fill in this blank: The Lord is my __________. Various characters in the Bible answered that question in different ways: Moses said, “The LORD is my strength and my song. . . . The LORD is my banner” (Exod. 15:2; 17:15). The psalmist said, “The LORD is my refuge” (Ps. 94:22). Isaiah said, “God is my salvation” (Isa. 12:2). Jeremiah wrote, “The LORD is my portion” (Lam. 3:24). The writer of Hebrews said, “The Lord is my helper” (Heb. 13:6). David said, “The LORD is my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer, my God, my mountain where I seek refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold ” (Ps. 18:2). And we all say, “The LORD is my shepherd ” (Ps. 23:1). The old-time Christians had a phrase for all this. When we seek Him with all our hearts, Jesus becomes our “all-in-all.” He fills all our lives, meets all our needs, and claims all our affections. Jesus only, Jesus ever, Jesus all in all we sing, Savior, Sanctifier, and Healer, Glorious Lord and coming King. —A. B. Simpson

When no answer came after the second letter to Ostwald, Hermann Einstein took it upon himself, without his son’s knowledge, to make an unusual and awkward effort, suffused with heart-wrenching emotion, to prevail upon Ostwald himself: Please forgive a father who is so bold as to turn to you, esteemed Herr Professor, in the interest of his son. Albert is 22 years old, he studied at the Zurich Polytechnic for four years, and he passed his exam with flying colors last summer. Since then he has been trying unsuccessfully to get a position as a teaching assistant, which would enable him to continue his education in physics. All those in a position to judge praise his talents; I can assure you that he is extraordinarily studious and diligent and clings with great love to his science. He therefore feels profoundly unhappy about his current lack of a job, and he becomes more and more convinced that he has gone off the tracks with his career. In addition, he is oppressed by the thought that he is a burden on us, people of modest means. Since it is you whom my son seems to admire and esteem more than any other scholar in physics, it is you to whom I have taken the liberty of turning with the humble request to read his paper and to write to him, if possible, a few words of encouragement, so that he might recover his joy in living and working. If, in addition, you could secure him an assistant’s position, my gratitude would know no bounds. I beg you to forgive me for my impudence in writing you, and my son does not know anything about my unusual step.25

22 year old Alexandra V. Tobias from Jacksonville, Florida, shook her 3 month old son, Dylan Lee Edmonson, to death because he interrupted her Farmville game on Facebook.

So I saw that there is nothing better for men than that they should be happy in their work, for that is what they are here for, and no one can bring them back to life to enjoy what will be in the future, so let them enjoy it now. —Ecclesiastes 3:22 (TLB) Recently, I learned that a book on friendship that I’d written with my best friend, Melanie, was rejected by a publisher who had been very positive about it for over two years. I was devastated. All those months and years of writing, rewriting, and then reworking it again…only to have it rejected in the end. I was ready to give up my career altogether, retire, and concentrate on biking, swimming, kayaking, and traveling. Then I read something my pen pal Oscar had written about his own retirement twenty-five years earlier. He wrote that in retirement we must have direction and purpose, accept change, remain curious and confident, communicate, and be committed. The longer I looked at his list, the more it spoke to me. Why, those are the very attributes I need to be a good writer, I thought. So I decided to buckle down and rework other unsold manuscripts I’d written over the years. Using Oscar’s plan of direction, purpose, confidence, and commitment helped me to stop telling people that I didn’t have any marketing genes and to keep busy rewriting and looking for different publishers. I may never sell all of my work, but I’m living a life filled with purpose. And I’m a whole lot happier in my semiretirement than if I was just playing every day, all day. Father, give me purpose in life whether it’s volunteer work, pursuing dreams, reworking an old career, or finding a new way to use the talents You’ve given me. —Patricia Lorenz Digging Deeper: Prv 16:9; Rom 12:3–8