Bat Signal Quotes

I'm playing 'chicken' with a kid called 'Robin.' I don't know why he's showing off. I don't know why I'm going along with it. I don't even know where we're going. It could be a robbery. Or prison break. A gang war. Or free donuts at Lenny's. He sees that Bat-signal in the sky and takes off. Like a bird out of Hell. And he just expects me to follow him. And I do.

Best friend bat signal.

To prevent becoming overwhelmed by the world around us, we must, as the ancients practiced, learn how to limit our passions and their control over our lives. It takes skill and discipline to bat away the pests of bad perceptions, to separate reliable signals from deceptive ones, to filter out prejudice, expectation, and fear. But it’s worth it, for what’s left is truth. While others are excited or afraid, we will remain calm and imperturbable. We will see things simply and straightforwardly, as they truly are—neither good nor bad.

Batman: One more thing. When you find something out, you can call me on this. Commissioner Gordan: A cell phone with one button? Batman: A bat signal. Commissioner Gordan: Christ. He actually put a bat on it.

X? Seriously? What, do you meet them in darkened parking garages? Do you have a Bat-Signal or something?

You’re part of the Greatest Generation, too, you old bat.

(…) Trying to think of how to take the least crowded ways to class, so the least amount of people will stare at the hole in my neck. Sometimes it feels like it has a beacon in it, flashing for the entire world to see, except it's not cool like the Bat signal.

What a well-designed forecasting system can do is sort out which statistics are relatively more susceptible to luck; batting average, for instance, is more erratic than home runs.

Look around, Dollface. Make those ovaries light up. I want them to shine the bat signal for my boys.

You’re more like dun-dun-na-NAH Romantic Man whose superpower is hopeless romanticism. Your bat signal would be a big red heart over Gotham.

The internet. Can we trust in that? Of course not. Give it six months and we'll probably discover Google's sewn together by orphans in sweatshops. Or that Wi-Fi does something horrible to your brain, like eating your fondest memories and replacing them with drawings of cross-eyed bats and a strong smell of puke. There's surely a great dystopian sci-fi novel yet to be written about a world in which it's suddenly discovered that wireless broadband signals deaden the human brain, slowly robbing us of all emotion, until after 10 years of exposure we're all either rutting in stairwells or listlessly reversing our cars over our own offspring with nary the merest glimmer of sympathy or pain on our faces. It'll be set in Basingstoke and called, "Cuh, Typical.

I put a video out,” Alex said, “a message to Trump. And then two days later he lays out the case. It’s like sending up the Bat Signal.” Was this true? It seemed unlikely, but when I got home I discovered that journalists had indeed spotted several occasions where Alex had said something on his show and Trump had said the same thing — right down to the peculiar phrasing — soon after.

On April 14 in Boston, Elston’s name went down in Yankee history. He got into his first game when Irv Noren was ejected over a call at home plate. According to the Black Associated Press, Elston made his Yankee debut at 4:32 p.m. “Howard’s appearance at-bat signaled the fall of a dynasty that had been assailed on all sides as being anti-Negro. The fans gave Howard a well-deserved round of applause, making his debut on the heretofore lily-white Bronx Bombers.” Elston played three innings that day. He singled and drove in a run in an 8–4 loss to the Red Sox. Finally, the Yankees had become the thirteenth club in the major leagues to field a black player. The only holdouts were the Philadelphia Phillies, Detroit Tigers, and Boston Red Sox.

Or there, in the clay-baked piedmont of the South, that lean and tan-faced boy who sprawls there in the creaking chair among admiring cronies before the open doorways of the fire department, and tells them how he pitched the team to shut-out victory to-day. What visions burn, what dreams possess him, seeker of the night? The packed stands of the stadium, the bleachers sweltering with their unshaded hordes, the faultless velvet of the diamond, unlike the clay-balked outfields down in Georgia. The mounting roar of eighty thousand voices and Gehrig coming up to bat, the boy himself upon the pitching mound, the lean face steady as a hound’s; then the nod, the signal, and the wind-up, the rawhide arm that snaps and crackles like a whip, the small white bullet of the blazing ball, its loud report in the oiled pocket of the catcher’s mitt, the umpire’s thumb jerked upwards, the clean strike.

If too little glucose is available in your blood, which is what happens when you follow a low - carbohydrate diet, then your liver hoards glucose so that your brain, which needs glucose to function, doesn't starve. While your body will start to break down fat to use as fuel, your brain can't run that way for long, and it will send out the Bat-Signal for more calories. That's the reason why when you skip a meal or go too long between meals, you find yourself running to the nearest donut or bag of chips.

He smiled and pulled the ugly white fichu from her neck. She blinked and looked down at the simple, square neckline of her bodice as if she'd never seen it. Perhaps she hadn't. Perhaps she dressed in the dark like a nun. "What are you doing?" He sighed. "I confess, I find your naïveté perplexing. How have you arrived at the advanced age of six and twenty without having anyone attempt seduction upon yourself? I'm of two minds on the matter: One, utter astonishment at my sex and their deaf disregard for your siren call. Two, glee at the thought that your innocence might signal that you are indeed innocent. Why this should excite me so, I don't know- virginity has never before been a particular whim of mine. I think perhaps it's the setting. Who knows how many virgins were deflowered here by my lusty ancestors? Or," he said as he deftly unpinned and tossed aside her apron, "maybe it's simply you." "I don't..." Her words trailed off and then, interestingly, she blushed a deep rose. Well. That question settled, then. His little maiden was really a maiden. "What?" "I think it's you," he confided, pulling the strings tying her hideous mobcap beneath her chin. She made a wild grab for it, but he was faster, snatching the bloody thing off- finally, and with a great deal of satisfaction. She might've deprived him of a wife that it'd taken him half a year and a rather large sum of money to entangle, but by God, he'd taken off her awful cap. And underneath... "Oh, Séraphine," he breathed, enchanted, for her hair was as black as coal, as black as night, as black as his own soul, save for one white streak just over her left eye. But she'd twisted and braided and tortured the strands, binding them tight to her head, and his fingers itched to let them free. "Don't!" she said, as if she knew what he wanted, her hands flying up to cover her hair. He batted them aside, laughing, pulling a pin here, a pin there, dropping them carelessly to the carpet as she squealed like a little girl and backed away from him, trying frantically to ward off his fingers. He might've taken pity on her had he not just spent an hour on a freezing moor, wondering if he was going to find her dead, neck broken, at the bottom of a hill. Her hair came down all at once, a tumbling mass, tousled and heavy and nearly down to her waist. "Wonderful," he murmured, taking it in both hands and lifting it.

The talent code is built on revolutionary scientific discoveries involving a neural insulator called myelin, which some neurologists now consider to be the holy grail of acquiring skill. Here's why. Every human skill, whether it's playing baseball or playing Bach, is created by chains of nerve fibers carrying a tiny electrical impulse—basically, a signal traveling through a circuit. Myelin's vital role is to wrap those nerve fibers the same way that rubber insulation wraps a copper wire, making the signal stronger and faster by preventing the electrical impulses from leaking out. When we fire our circuits in the right way—when we practice swinging that bat or playing that note—our myelin responds by wrapping layers of insulation around that neural circuit, each new layer adding a bit more skill and speed. The thicker the myelin gets, the better it insulates, and the faster and more accurate our movements and thoughts become.

If talking pictures could be said to have a father, it was Lee De Forest, a brilliant but erratic inventor of electrical devices of all types. (He had 216 patents.) In 1907, while searching for ways to boost telephone signals, De Forest invented something called the thermionic triode detector. De Forest’s patent described it as “a System for Amplifying Feeble Electric Currents” and it would play a pivotal role in the development of broadcast radio and much else involving the delivery of sound, but the real developments would come from others. De Forest, unfortunately, was forever distracted by business problems. Several companies he founded went bankrupt, twice he was swindled by his backers, and constantly he was in court fighting over money or patents. For these reasons, he didn’t follow through on his invention. Meanwhile, other hopeful inventors demonstrated various sound-and-image systems—Cinematophone, Cameraphone, Synchroscope—but in every case the only really original thing about them was their name. All produced sounds that were faint or muddy, or required impossibly perfect timing on the part of the projectionist. Getting a projector and sound system to run in perfect tandem was basically impossible. Moving pictures were filmed with hand-cranked cameras, which introduced a slight variability in speed that no sound system could adjust to. Projectionists also commonly repaired damaged film by cutting out a few frames and resplicing what remained, which clearly would throw out any recording. Even perfect film sometimes skipped or momentarily stuttered in the projector. All these things confounded synchronization. De Forest came up with the idea of imprinting the sound directly onto the film. That meant that no matter what happened with the film, sound and image would always be perfectly aligned. Failing to find backers in America, he moved to Berlin in the early 1920s and there developed a system that he called Phonofilm. De Forest made his first Phonofilm movie in 1921 and by 1923 he was back in America giving public demonstrations. He filmed Calvin Coolidge making a speech, Eddie Cantor singing, George Bernard Shaw pontificating, and DeWolf Hopper reciting “Casey at the Bat.” By any measure, these were the first talking pictures. However, no Hollywood studio would invest in them. The sound quality still wasn’t ideal, and the recording system couldn’t quite cope with multiple voices and movement of a type necessary for any meaningful dramatic presentation. One invention De Forest couldn’t make use of was his own triode detector tube, because the patents now resided with Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T. Western Electric had been using the triode to develop public address systems for conveying speeches to large crowds or announcements to fans at baseball stadiums and the like. But in the 1920s it occurred to some forgotten engineer at the company that the triode detector could be used to project sound in theaters as well. The upshot was that in 1925 Warner Bros. bought the system from Western Electric and dubbed it Vitaphone. By the time of The Jazz Singer, it had already featured in theatrical presentations several times. Indeed, the Roxy on its opening night in March 1927 played a Vitaphone feature of songs from Carmen sung by Giovanni Martinelli. “His voice burst from the screen with splendid synchronization with the movements of his lips,” marveled the critic Mordaunt Hall in the Times. “It rang through the great theatre as if he had himself been on the stage.

As I became older, I was given many masks to wear. I could be a laborer laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be pulled by pranksters; a gardener trimming the shrubs while secretly planting a bomb; a saboteur before the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, signaling the Imperial Fleet; a kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly, screaming 'Banzai' on my way to my death; a peasant with a broad-brimmed straw hat in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, stooped over to toil in the water; an obedient servant in the parlor, a houseboy too dignified for my own good; a washerman in the basement laundry, removing stains using an ancient secret; a tyrant intent on imposing my despotism on the democratic world, opposed by the free and the brave; a party cadre alongside many others, all of us clad in coordinated Mao jackets; a sniper camouflaged in the trees of the jungle, training my gunsights on G.I. Joe; a child running with a body burning from napalm, captured in an unforgettable photo; an enemy shot in the head or slaughtered by the villageful; one of the grooms in a mass wedding of couples, having met my mate the day before through our cult leader; an orphan in the last airlift out of a collapsed capital, ready to be adopted into the good life; a black belt martial artist breaking cinderblocks with his head, in an advertisement for Ginsu brand knives with the slogan 'but wait--there's more' as the commercial segued to show another free gift; a chef serving up dog stew, a trick on the unsuspecting diner; a bad driver swerving into the next lane, exactly as could be expected; a horny exchange student here for a year, eager to date the blonde cheerleader; a tourist visiting, clicking away with his camera, posing my family in front of the monuments and statues; a ping pong champion, wearing white tube socks pulled up too high and batting the ball with a wicked spin; a violin prodigy impressing the audience at Carnegie Hall, before taking a polite bow; a teen computer scientist, ready to make millions on an initial public offering before the company stock crashes; a gangster in sunglasses and a tight suit, embroiled in a turf war with the Sicilian mob; an urban greengrocer selling lunch by the pound, rudely returning change over the counter to the black patrons; a businessman with a briefcase of cash bribing a congressman, a corrupting influence on the electoral process; a salaryman on my way to work, crammed into the commuter train and loyal to the company; a shady doctor, trained in a foreign tradition with anatomical diagrams of the human body mapping the flow of life energy through a multitude of colored points; a calculus graduate student with thick glasses and a bad haircut, serving as a teaching assistant with an incomprehensible accent, scribbling on the chalkboard; an automobile enthusiast who customizes an imported car with a supercharged engine and Japanese decals in the rear window, cruising the boulevard looking for a drag race; a illegal alien crowded into the cargo hold of a smuggler's ship, defying death only to crowd into a New York City tenement and work as a slave in a sweatshop. My mother and my girl cousins were Madame Butterfly from the mail order bride catalog, dying in their service to the masculinity of the West, and the dragon lady in a kimono, taking vengeance for her sisters. They became the television newscaster, look-alikes with their flawlessly permed hair. Through these indelible images, I grew up. But when I looked in the mirror, I could not believe my own reflection because it was not like what I saw around me. Over the years, the world opened up. It has become a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural fragments, arranged and rearranged without plan or order.

And then it sends a signal to turn off the system.” “So the universe with the wallet in the chamber waiting to be sent still exists,” added Allen. “But the universe from which it is actually sent never does.”  “That is just so messed up,” said Blake in exasperation, and Jenna, Walsh, and Soyer nodded their agreement. “Here is my advice to all of you,” said Cargill. “The best thing to do is ignore time travel, and don’t think about the paradoxes too hard. If you do, your head really will explode,” he added with a wry smile. “Just think of it as duplication and teleportation. But always keep in mind that the universe seems to go out of its way to ensure that infinite alternate timelines aren’t allowed. So no matter what, we only ever get this one universe.” He sighed. “So we’d better make sure we don’t screw it up.”     48   Brian Hamilton hated Cheyenne Mountain. Sure, it was one of the most interesting places in the world to visit, but living there only worked if you were a bat. The Palomar facility had also been underground, but nothing like this. It had a much larger security perimeter, so trips to the surface were easier to make happen. Not that it really mattered. Soon enough he would be traveling on another assignment anyway, living in a hotel room somewhere. But what he really wanted was to work side by side with Edgar Knight, toward their common goal. He was tired of being Knight’s designated spy, having to watch Lee Cargill squander Q5’s vast resources and capabilities. Watching him crawl like a wounded baby when he could be soaring. Cargill was an idiot. He could transform the world, but he was too weak to do it. He could wipe out the asshole terrorists who wanted nothing more than to butcher the helpless. If you have the ultimate cure for cancer, you use it to wipe out the disease once and for all. You don’t wield your cure only as a last resort, when the cancer has all but choked the life out of you. Edgar Knight, on the other hand, was a man with vision. He was able to make the tough decisions. If you were captain of a life raft with a maximum capacity of ten people, choosing to take five passengers of a sinking ship on board was an easy decision, not a heroic one. But what about when there were fifty passengers? Was it heroic to take them all, dooming everyone to death? Or was the heroic move using force, if necessary, to limit this number, to ensure some would survive? Sure, from the outside this looked coldhearted, while the converse seemed compassionate. But watching the world circle the drain because you were too much of a pussy to make the hard decisions was the real crime. Survival of the fittest was harsh reality. In the animal kingdom it was eat or be eaten. If you saw a group of fuck-nuts just itching to nuke the world back into the Dark Ages—who believed the Messiah equivalent, the twelfth Imam, would only come out to play when Israel was destroyed, and worldwide Armageddon unleashed—you wiped them out. To a man. Or else they’d do the same to you. It had been three days since Cargill had reported that he was on the verge of acquiring Jenna Morrison and Aaron Blake.

Let everybody everywhere see Your Light. Shine it like the bat signal high in the night. It’s once upon a midnight dreary. Poe was right. There’s a raven sitting in, and it’s not taking flight. Send it back to the shore, and make it stay outside. There’s a perfect storm thrashing them on the inside where their blindness, and emptiness both collide. I’m all buckled up, Lord. Tested and tried.

these features have the potential to create an ecosystem in which attention is more directly and precisely compensated. It won’t necessarily end the phenomenon of “clickbait” journalism—presumably, if stories on Kim Kardashian continue to draw people’s attention, they will fetch the highest payouts in BATS. But the option to tip publishers could send more nuanced, informative signals to them. We don’t know for sure how people will behave, but perhaps they’ll be more inclined to tip BATs for a work of insight and effort than for a sexy photo they felt compelled to click on.

This is Pride Month, and in this life, you’ve got to be your own hero. Forget waiting for a caped crusader—grab your own cape and strut your stuff. Embrace your true colors, wave that rainbow flag like it’s your superpower, and remember: the best hero is the one staring back at you in the mirror. Be bold, be fierce, and let your pride shine brighter than any bat signal. So, suit up and show the world that the greatest superhero of all is you, living your truth unapologetically!

So consciousness is best left uninvited from most of the parties. When it does get included, it’s usually the last one to hear the information. Take hitting a baseball. On August 20, 1974, in a game between the California Angels and the Detroit Tigers, the Guinness Book of World Records clocked Nolan Ryan’s fastball at 100.9 miles per hour (44.7 meters per second). If you work the numbers, you’ll see that Ryan’s pitch departs the mound and crosses home plate, sixty-feet, six inches away, in four-tenths of a second. This gives just enough time for light signals from the baseball to hit the batter’s eye, work through the circuitry of the retina, activate successions of cells along the loopy superhighways of the visual system at the back of the head, cross vast territories to the motor areas, and modify the contraction of the muscles swinging the bat. Amazingly, this entire sequence is possible in less than four-tenths of a second; otherwise no one would ever hit a fastball. But the surprising part is that conscious awareness takes longer than that: about half a second, as we will see in Chapter 2. So the ball travels too rapidly for batters to be consciously aware of it. One does not need to be consciously aware to perform sophisticated motor acts. You can notice this when you begin to duck from a snapping tree branch before you are aware that it’s coming toward you, or when you’re already jumping up when you first become aware of the phone’s ring.

Don’t you have a werewolf bat-signal?

It takes skill and discipline to bat away the pests of bad perceptions, to separate reliable signals from deceptive ones, to filter out prejudice, expectation, and fear. But it’s worth it, for what’s left is truth.

Even up until the final moment of life, bat and moth are linked together forever, through time, and beyond. As a last-gasp evasive maneuver, a fleeing moth will sometimes stop its wingbeats in midflight, thereby ceasing to give off data to the bat's radar. But sometimes the bat will pause, too, so that the moth can't pick up any radar signals-the bat seeming to have disappeared-and for just the briefest of moments they will both hang there, suspended in eternity.

Did you know that he was the one responsible for the umpire giving hand signals for a ball or a strike? Raising his right hand for a strike, you know, and stuff like that. He’d be up at bat and he couldn’t hear and he couldn’t talk, so he’d look around at the umpire to see what the pitch was, a ball or a strike. That’s where the hand signs for the umpires calling balls and strikes began. That’s a fact. Very few people know that.

There's not much you can count on in this world anymore, but the gay man's female best friend responding to his bat signal is one of them.

I did not know that a meeting had been called this evening, but apparently, Declan sent out the Bat-Signal and here we are, five old spies with five lifetimes’ worth of experience. Retired does not mean useless. Everyone here has brought their individual tricks of the trade.

The sunset of the forest had given the signal to robin and tanager to begin their vesper song. The sunset of the mount had issued the dew-time call that conjures out of the caves and hollow trees the smallest of the winged Brownie folk, whose kingdom is the twilight and whose dance hall is high above the tree-tops.

I didn’t expect to see him again, and I was never going to just show up at his house, but it was still comforting to know that he wasn’t far. Like there was some sort of emotional Bat Signal I could’ve sent him if I was ever in trouble.

I’d been hoping for a bat signal.

Most of the weddings I have attended since have a three-hour time limit on the free alcohol. The bat signal goes out to the guests that the open bar is about to close, and people savagely race to the bar, like those shitty-ass buffalos who trampled all over Mufasa in The Lion King, to get their last glass of complimentary booze to hold them over for the rest of the evening.

We all know the situation; the brilliant quick bowler with his tail up delivers the ball on a perfect length and line. A hint of swing has it pitching just outside off, before seam movement takes it further away from the right hander who would be well advised, if good enough, to leave well alone. But he only has a fraction of a second to respond and make his decision. Yet somehow this astonishing batsman is neither shouldering arms nor nibbling, he’s standing tall and smashing a wicket-taking delivery through the covers, on the up, to the boundary. 'Wow,' enthuses the commentator, 'I’m here to tell you that was some shot.' And it was. Next over, same bowler, same ball, same response but instead of that beautiful meaty sound of ball meeting sweet-spot there is a heavy click as a thick edge flies waste high to a grateful third slip. 'Gone! And you have to say that was a poor shot – no foot movement.' "The gap between brilliant and brainless was some four centimetres. Or was it? Surely the first shot was every bit as reckless and feckless? Our foolhardy batsman got away with his poor shot selection first time but within minutes he went from hero to zero. So who is our thrilling and exasperating protagonist? Take your pick: Victor Trumper, Stan McCabe, Denis Compton, Barry Richards, Gordon Greenidge, Virender Sehwag. This is how they played, the risks they took made them what they were: the most thrilling, watchable and often frustrating batsmen of their respective generations. If you want the highs then you must take the lows, and for each run-a-ball century there will be a horridly inappropriate early-innings catastrophe signalling disappointment for all neutrals.

we are not just talking about hydrogen and oxygen combining into water; we are talking about carbon, hydrogen, and other elements combining into living beings that breathe, move around, and reproduce. In other words, matter must not only have the potential to produce new properties; it must also have the hidden potential to come alive! Matter must, under propitious conditions, be able to manifest itself in forms as diverse as ants that can find their way home across an unmarked landscape using the sun as their compass; or birds that can in winter recover hundreds of food items stored in the fall; or bats that can navigate and find prey in the dark using a form of sound signals called echolocation. Evolution can show why these capacities were selected, but it cannot account for how matter came to possess