Batting Order Quotes

We won't be seeing you,' Fred told Professor Umbridge, swinging his leg over his broomstick. 'Yeah, don't bother to keep in touch,' said George, mounting his own. Fred looked around at the assembled students, and at the silent, watchful crowd. 'If anyone fancies buying a Portable Swamp, as demonstrated upstairs, come to number ninety-three, Diagon Alley — Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes,' he said in a loud voice, 'Our new premises!' 'Special discounts to Hogwarts students who swear they're going to use our products to get rid of this old bat,' added George, pointing at Professor Umbridge. 'STOP THEM!' shrieked Umbridge, but it was too late. As the Inquisitorial Squad closed in, Fred and George kicked off from the floor, shooting fifteen feet into the air, the iron peg swinging dangerously below. Fred looked across the hall at the poltergeist bobbing on his level above the crowd. 'Give her hell from us, Peeves.' And Peeves, who Harry had never seen take an order from a student before, swept his belled hat from his head and sprang to a salute as Fred and George wheeled about to tumultuous applause from the students below and sped out of the open front doors into the glorious sunset.

Yeah, size is no guarantee of power,” said George. “Look at Ginny.” “What d’you mean?” said Harry. “You’ve never been on the receiving end of one of her Bat-Bogey Hexes, have you?

No matter how bad things get, you can always see the beauty in them. The worse things get, the more you have to make yourself see the magic in order to survive.

...Hoping for the best, like hoping for a bat to obey your orders, almost always leads to disappointment.

It's alright" said a dreamy voice from beside Harry as Ron vanished into the coach's dark interior. "You're not going mad or anything. I can see them too." "Can you?" said Harry desperately, turning to Luna. He could see the bat-winged horses reflected in her wide, silvery eyes. "Oh yes," said Luna, "I've been able to see them since my first year here. They've always pulled the carriages. Don't worry. You're just as sane as I am." Smiling faintly, she climbed into the musty interior of the carriage after Ron. Not altogether reassured, Harry followed her.

Today the U.S. government can demand the nation-wide recall of defective softball bats, sneakers, stuffed animals, and foam-rubber toy cows. But it cannot order a meatpacking company to remove contaminated, potentially lethal ground beef from fast food kitchens and supermarket shelves.

Booyah, I will summon the ninja. Oh, and take a lunch break while we burgle." "You're going, too?" "Am I not ninja enough? Are you saying that I lack ninja?" "No, I was just thinking you're a little, uh, recognizable, maybe?" Eve batted her thick eyelashes. "Why, thank you, sweetie. That's the nicest insult I've had today, not counting the jock who said he'd date me but he had a restraining order out for necrophelia.

So, a crash course for the amnesiac,” Leo said, in a helpful tone that made Jason think this was not going to be helpful. “We go to the ‘Wilderness School’”—Leo made air quotes with his fingers. “Which means we’re ‘bad kids.’ Your family, or the court, or whoever, decided you were too much trouble, so they shipped you off to this lovely prison—sorry, ‘boarding school’—in Armpit, Nevada, where you learn valuable nature skills like running ten miles a day through the cacti and weaving daisies into hats! And for a special treat we go on ‘educational’ field trips with Coach Hedge, who keeps order with a baseball bat.

Special discounts to Hogwarts students who swear they’re going to use our products to get rid of this old bat,” added George, pointing at Professor Umbridge.

The most famous lenders in nature are vampire bats. These bats congregate in the thousands inside caves, and every night fly out to look for prey. When they find a sleeping bird or careless mammal, they make a small incision in its skin, and suck its blood. But not all vampire bats find a victim every night. In order to cope with the uncertainty of their life, the vampires loan blood to each other. A vampire that fails to find prey will come home and ask a more fortunate friend to regurgitate some stolen blood. Vampires remember very well to whom they loaned blood, so at a later date if the friend returns home hungry, he will approach his debtor, who will reciprocate the favour. However, unlike human bankers, vampires never charge interest.

He looked around for the most trustworthy person, for someone to be on his team. He took a gamble and dumped Bat into Lily's arms. "Watch him for me, will you?" he asked. "Make sure he gets out all right?" "Put that werewolf down immediately, Lily," Raphael ordered. "It really hurts that you would say that," Bat muttered, and shut his eyes. Lily considered Bat's head, pillowed on her lavender bosom. "I don't want to put him down," she announced. "The Shadowhunter gave this DJ to me." Bat opened one eye. "Do you like music?" "I do," said Lily. "I like jazz." "Cool," said Bat. Raphael threw up his hands. "This is ridiculous! Fine," he snapped. "Fine. Let's just vacate the collapsing mansion, shall we? Can we all agree on that one fun, non-suicidal activity.

So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an Einsteinian and a Shakespearean and a Spinozist, who had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe and had a copy of Marilyn’s conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky's front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the shul if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.

I sit on the bed and think how life is never safe and they should tell you that right off the bat. Things happen out of order and just plain wrong, and there is not one thing you can do about it. The message of every morning is? ??????????

It's all right," said a dreamy voice from beside Harry as Ron vanished into the coach's dark interior. "You're not going mad or anything. I can see them, too." "Can you?" said Harry desperately, turning to Luna. He could see the bat-winged horses reflected in her wide silvery eyes. "Oh, yes," said Luna, "I've been able to see them ever since my first day here. They've always pulled the carriages. Don't worry. You're just as sane as I am.

It is getting dark. In the low mists over the hills, an orange glow broods, as if the trees are on fire. Bats are flooding out from the hundreds of caves that perforate these mountainsides. I watch them plunge into the mists without any hesitation, trusting in the echoes and silences in which they fly. Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analyzing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?

Stengel admitted. “I’m not going to make any decision until I have to give the umpire my batting order. Then you’ll know as well as I.” The next afternoon, Casey resisted

This is it I’m not coming after you I’m going to lie down for half an hour This is it I’m not going down On your memory I’m not rubbing my face in it anymore I’m going to yawn I’m going to stretch I’m going to put a knitting needle Up my nose And poke out my brain I don’t want to love you For the rest of my life I want your skin To fall off my skin I want my clamp To release your clamp I don’t want to live With this tongue hanging out And another filthy song In the place Of my baseball bat This is it I’m going to sleep now darling Don’t try to stop me I’m going to sleep I’ll have a smooth face And I’m going to drool I’ll be asleep Whether you love me or not This is it The new world order Of wrinkles and bad breath It’s not going to be Like it was before Eating you With my eyes closed Hoping you won’t get up And go away It’s going to be something else Something worse Something sillier Something like this Only shorter

The last werewolf tripped over Raphael Santiago’s foot. Alec hastily hit him in the back of the head with the hilt of his seraph blade, and the werewolf stayed down. “That was an accident,” said Raphael, with Lily and Elliott sticking close behind him. “He got in my way as I was trying to leave.” “Okay,” Alec panted. He wiped dust and sweat out of his eyes. Bat the DJ staggered toward them, claws out, and Alec flipped his seraph blade so he was holding the hilt again. “Someone dropped a piece of roof on me,” Bat told him, blinking in a way that was more owlish than wolfish. “Inconsiderate.” Alec realized Bat was not so much on a murderous out-of-control rampage as mildly concussed. “Easy there,” he said, as Bat tumbled against his chest. He looked around for the most trustworthy person, for someone to be on his team. He took a gamble and dumped Bat into Lily’s arms. “Watch him for me, will you?” he asked. “Make sure he gets out all right.” “Put that werewolf down immediately, Lily,” Raphael ordered. “It really hurts that you would say that,” Bat muttered, and shut his eyes. Lily considered Bat’s head, pillowed on her lavender bosom. “I don’t want to put him down,” she announced. “The Shadowhunter gave this DJ to me.” Bat opened one eye. “Do you like music?” “I do,” said Lily. “I like jazz.” “Cool,” said Bat. Raphael threw up his hands. “This is ridiculous! Fine,” he snapped. “Fine. Let’s just vacate the collapsing mansion, shall we? Can we all agree on that one fun, non-suicidal activity?

Do you want to know the first time I ever saw you?" he said with his lips at my ear. I knew the story,but I nodded anyway, frantically. "Your family had just moved in. You were...how old were you,Becks?" I shrugged,and he ran his fingers over my head, calming me.He knew the answer. "You were eleven," he said. "I was twelve.I remember Joey Velasquez talking about the pretty new girl in the neighborhood.Actually his exact words were 'the hot chick.' But I didn't think a thing about it until I saw you at the baseball field. We were having practice at the park and your family showed up for a picnic.You had so much dark hair,and it was hiding your face.Remember?" I nodded. "I know what you're trying to do." He ignored me. "I had to see if Joey was right,about the hot chick part, and I kept trying to get a good look at your face, but you never looked over our way.I hit home run after home run trying to get your attention, but you couldn't be bothered with my record-shattering, supherhuman performance." I smiled,and breathed in slowly. I'd heard this story so many times before.The familiarity of it enveloped me with warmth. "So what did you do?" I asked, fully aware of the answer. "I did the only thing I could think of. I went up to the bat,lined my feet up in the direction of your head,and swung away." "Hitting the foulest foul ball anyone had ever seen," I continued the story. I felt him chuckle next to me. "Yep. I figured in order to return the ball,you'd have to get really close to me, because..." He waited for me to fill in the blank. "Because someone made the mistake of assuming I would throw like a girl," I said softly. He pressed his lips against my head before he went on. "Which,of course, was stupid of me to think. You stood right where you were and chucked the ball farther than I'd ever seen a girl, or even any guy,chuck it." "It was all those years of Bonnet Ball my parents forced on me." "The entire team went nuts. You gave a little tiny shrug, like it was no big deal, and sat back down with your family. Completely ignoring me again. So my plan totally backfired. Not only did you get the attention of every boy on the field-which was not my intention-but I got reamed by the coach, who couldn't understand why I suddenly decided to stand perpendicular to home plate.

It would be incorrect in every sense to say that so near the end of his life he had lost his faith, when in fact God seemed more abundant to him in the Regina Cleri home than any place he had been before. God was in the folds of his bathrobe, the ache of his knees. God saturated the hallways in the form of a pale electrical light. But now that his heart had become so shiftless and unreliable, now that he should be sensing the afterlife like a sweet scent drifting in from the garden, he had started to wonder if there was in fact no afterlife at all. Look at all these true believers who wanted only to live, look at himself, cling onto this life like a squirrel scrambling up the icy pitch of a roof. In suggesting that there may be nothing ahead of them, he in no way meant to diminish the future; instead, Father Sullivan hoped to elevate the present to a state of the divine. It seemed from this moment of repose that God may well have been life itself. God may have been the baseball games, the beautiful cigarette he smoked alone after checking to see that all the bats had been put back behind the closet door. God could have been the masses in which he had told people how best to prepare for the glorious life everlasting, the one they couldn't see as opposed to the one they were living at that exact moment in the pews of the church hall, washed over in stained glass light. How wrongheaded it seemed now to think that the thrill of heartbeat and breath were just a stepping stone to something greater. What could be greater than the armchair, the window, the snow? Life itself had been holy. We had been brought forth from nothing to see the face of God and in his life Father Sullivan had seen it miraculously for eighty-eight years. Why wouldn't it stand to reason that this had been the whole of existence and now he would retreat back to the nothingness he had come from in order to let someone else have their turn at the view. This was not the workings of disbelief. It was instead a final, joyful realization of all he had been given. It would be possible to overlook just about anything if you were trained to constantly strain forward to see the power and the glory that was waiting up ahead. What a shame it would have been to miss God while waiting for him.

Bats are flooding out from the hundreds of caves that perforate these mountainsides. I watch them plunge into the mists without any hesitation, trusting in the echoes and silences in which they fly. Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analyzing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?

Last year – and all the years before it, ever since Little League – batting felt almost peaceful. Not effortless – God knows it wasn’t effortless – but natural. But there’s nothing natural or peaceful about hitting a projectile that’s coming for you at nearly a hundred miles an hour. There’s a violence that baseball, at its best, disguises in a way that other sports leave out in the open. Baseball has a way of looking like fun even when it’s grueling. Eddie thinks that he had to get to the root of the ugliness in order to play the game again. He had to see it for what it is. Maybe he had to find something to fight.

He had seen Alessandra Pino only once before, but he never forgot her… he had heard many rumors about her, but they all ended with the same conclusion. She was crazy, stark-raving-mad-fuck-bat-crazy. She kept getting moved from purification site to purification site. Everyone wanted her. No one could handle her.

That’s advanced capitalism for you: The player making the maximum capital investment gets the maximum critical information in order to reap the maximum desired profit with maximum capital efficiency—and nobody bats an eye.

But as soon as we grasp this—and I appreciate it takes quite a bit of latching onto for people who have spent their whole lives thinking the other way—we see that if salvation is that sort of thing, it can’t be confined to human beings. When human beings are saved, in the past as a single coming-to-faith event, in the present through acts of healing and rescue, including answers to the prayer “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” and in the future when they are finally raised from the dead, this is always so that they can be genuine human beings in a fuller sense than they otherwise would have been. And genuine human beings, from Genesis 1 onward, are given the mandate of looking after creation, of bringing order to God’s world, of establishing and maintaining communities. To suppose that we are saved, as it were, for our own private benefit, for the restoration of our own relationship with God (vital though that is!), and for our eventual homecoming and peace in heaven (misleading though that is!) is like a boy being given a baseball bat as a present and insisting that since it belongs to him, he must always and only play with it in private. But of course you can only do what you’re meant to do with a baseball bat when you’re playing with other people. And salvation only does what it’s meant to do when those who have been saved, are being saved, and will one day fully be saved realize that they are saved not as souls but as wholes and not for themselves alone but for what God now longs to do through them.

You are insufferable sometimes. You're not doing me, or yourself, any favors by pretending not to mind when you get hurt. I would have slapped you harder if I didn't know the truth--if I didn't know that you would just blush and bat your lashes as someone tied a tourniquet around your thigh and prepared to saw your leg off. Do you know why the worst thing Papa has ever done to me is push me to my knees? Because I wail and the scream and beat his chest with my fists whenever he tries to do anything more than bark orders at me from the chaise. You think he wants some mute little china doll to cook his meals and wash his sheets? No. He wants daughters with teeth. The hurting is the point. I can't believe it's taken you twenty-three years to figure out--if you even understand what I'm saying at all. It's no fun stamping through old dirty snow. People want to ruin things that are clean and new... He can't stand the idea of anyone spoiling us but him.

[The plane's captain] reads off some message about how general orders stay in effect until you reach the States, and you're still considered on duty. So no alcohol. Well, our CO jumped up and said, "That makes about as much sense as a goddamn football bat. All right, Marines, you've got three hours. I hear they serve Guinness." Oo-fucking-rah.

She showed me her quilt, scraps of fabric pieced together into the pattern called Valmata’s Return. She was now stitching the top and batting and backing together, overlaying Valmata’s Return with a pattern called Scorpion Dance—appropriate to the story of Valmata, who returned from war and poisoned his father in order to take control of the family estates. They sang the ballad in Lohaiso.

THIS IS IT This is it I’m not coming after you I’m going to lie down for half an hour This is it I’m not going down on your memory I’m not rubbing my face in it any more I’m going to yawn I’m going to stretch I’m going to put a knitting needle up my nose and poke out my brain I don’t want to love you for the rest of my life I want your skin to fall off my skin I want my clamp to release your clamp I don’t want to live with this tongue hanging out and another filthy song in the place of my baseball bat This is it I’m going to sleep now darling Don’t try to stop me I’m going to sleep I’ll have a smooth face and I’m going to drool I’ll be asleep whether you love me or not This is it The New World Order of wrinkles and bad breath It’s not going to be like it was before eating you with my eyes closed hoping you won’t get up and go away It’s going to be something else Something worse Something sillier Something like this only shorter

the Egyptian expedition would later attempt to explore the inside of the Great Pyramid, which had only been opened up again a few years previously. The French traveler Savary was one of the first to penetrate the interior, and most vividly evokes the atmosphere inside the pyramid at this time: We left our coats at the entrance to the passage which led into the interior, and began to descend, each holding a burning torch. Towards the bottom, we had to wriggle on our bellies like snakes in order to gain access to the inner passageway. . . . We scrambled up this on our knees, at the same time pressing our hands against the sides. Had we not done this, we risked slipping backwards, and the slight grooves on its surface would not have been able to stop us from sliding all the way down to the bottom. About halfway up we fired a pistol shot whose deafening noise echoed away forever through all the distant recesses of the immense edifice. This awakened thousands of bats, which hurtled down, striking us on our hands and face and extinguishing several of our torches.27

The orders resting on BATS were typically just the 100-share minimum required for an order to be at the front of any price queue, as their only purpose was to tease information out of investors. The HFT firms posted these tiny orders on BATS—orders to buy or sell 100 shares of basically every stock traded in the U.S. market—not because they actually wanted to buy and sell the stocks but because they wanted to find out what investors wanted to buy and sell before they did it. BATS, unsurprisingly, had been created by high-frequency traders.

Already it is twilight down in the Laredito. Bats fly forth from their roostings in courthouse and tower and circle the quarter. The air is full of the smell of burning charcoal. Children and dogs squat by the mud stoops and gamecocks flap and settle in the branches of the fruit trees. They go afoot, these comrades, down along a bare adobe wall. Band music carries dimly from the square. They pass a watercart in the street and they pass a hole in the wall where by the light of a small forgefire an old man beats out shapes of metal. They pass in a doorway a young girl whose beauty becomes the flowers about. They arrive at last before a wooden door. It is hinged into a larger door or gate and all must step over the foot-high sill where a thousand boots have scuffled away the wood, where fools in their hundreds have tripped or fallen or tottered drunkenly into the street. They pass along a ramada in a courtyard by an old grape arbor where small fowl nod in the dusk among the gnarled and barren vines and they enter a cantina where the lamps are lit and they cross stooping under a low beam to a bar and belly up one two three. There is an old disordered Mennonite in this place and he turns to study them. A thin man in a leather weskit, a black and straightbrim hat set square on his head, a thin rim of whiskers. The recruits order glasses of whiskey and drink them down and order more. There are monte games at tables by the wall and there are whores at another table who look the recruits over. The recruits stand sideways along the bar with their thumbs in their belts and watch the room. They talk among themselves of the expedition in loud voices and the old Mennonite shakes a rueful head and sips his drink and mutters. They'll stop you at the river, he says. The second corporal looks past his comrades. Are you talking to me? At the river. Be told. They'll jail you to a man. Who will? The United States Army. General Worth. They hell they will. Pray that they will. He looks at his comrades. He leans toward the Mennonite. What does that mean, old man? Do ye cross that river with yon filibuster armed ye'll not cross it back. Don't aim to cross it back. We goin to Sonora. What's it to you, old man? The Mennonite watches the enshadowed dark before them as it is reflected to him in the mirror over the bar. He turns to them. His eyes are wet, he speaks slowly. The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman's making into a foreign land. Ye'll wake more than the dogs. But they berated the old man and swore at him until he moved off down the bar muttering, and how else could it be? How these things end. In confusion and curses and blood. They drank on and the wind blew in the streets and the stars that had been overhead lay low in the west and these young men fell afoul of others and words were said that could not be put right again and in the dawn the kid and the second corporal knelt over the boy from Missouri who had been named Earl and they spoke his name but he never spoke back. He lay on his side in the dust of the courtyard. The men were gone, the whores were gone. An old man swept the clay floor within the cantina. The boy lay with his skull broken in a pool of blood, none knew by whom. A third one came to be with them in the courtyard. It was the Mennonite. A warm wind was blowing and the east held a gray light. The fowls roosting among the grapevines had begun to stir and call. There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto, said the Mennonite. He had been holding his hat in his hands and now he set it upon his head again and turned and went out the gate.

Maybe at the end of our lives we get a Ferris-Wheel vantage of the whole tapestry, the quilt laid flat, answering for its complexity. At the beginning we’re handed frayed and stained flowery bed sheets, a scrap of polka-dots, a snatch of strawberry print. Tattered as they are, there’s some sustaining sweetness in there. The oldest pioneer quilts conceal bits of paper batting between their threadbare layers: postcards, recipes, clipped snippets of newspaper poetry. Every spare material had a part to play, fragments of experience and feeling arranged in a repeating pattern, little sewn sound bytes spinning ordered fractals.

What were you going to make for Christmas dinner?” one of my older children asked in a very reasonable tone. I cleared my throat, but couldn’t speak. There was no real explanation for my behavior. I’d been so intent on getting through this first Christmas without David. I’d found new rituals to replace the old, wrapped gifts, and even made cutout sugar cookies. I’d modified Christmas in order to endure it. What I hadn’t done was plan on or prepare a Christmas meal. Everyone was looking at me expectantly by this point, including my sweet, hungry grandchildren. “I forgot all about Christmas dinner,” I finally admitted. No one batted an eye.

The most famous lenders in nature are vampire bats. These bats congregate in the thousands inside caves, and every night fly out to look for prey. When they find a sleeping bird or careless mammal, they make a small incision in its skin, and suck its blood. But not all vampire bats find a victim every night. In order to cope with the uncertainty of their life, the vampires loan blood to each other. A vampire that fails to find prey will come home and ask a more fortunate friend to regurgitate some stolen blood. Vampires remember very well to whom they loaned blood, so at a later date if the friend returns home hungry, he will approach his debtor, who will reciprocate the favour.

A blind man walks into a bar, makes his way to a bar stool, and orders a drink. After sitting there for a while, he yells to the bartender, “Hey, you wanna hear a blonde joke?” The bar falls absolutely quiet. In a very deep, husky voice the woman next to him says, “Before you tell that joke, sir, I think it’s only fair that you should know five things: First, the bartender is a blonde girl with a baseball bat. Second, the bouncer is a blonde girl. Third, I’m a blonde with a black belt in karate. Fourth, the woman sitting next to me is a blonde and a professional boxer. Fifth, the lady to your right is a blonde and a decorated war veteran.” She puts her hand on the blind man’s arm and says, “Now think about it seriously, mister. Do you still want to tell that blonde joke?” The blind man thinks for a second, shakes his head, and mutters, “Naw, not if I’m gonna have to explain it five fucking times.

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.

claque, aka canned laughter It’s becoming increasingly clear that there’s nothing new under the sun (a heavenly body, by the way, that some Indian ascetics stare at till they go blind). I knew that some things had a history—the Constitution, rhythm and blues, Canada—but it’s the odd little things that surprise me with their storied past. This first struck me when I was reading about anesthetics and I learned that, in the early 1840s, it became fashionable to hold parties where guests would inhale nitrous oxide out of bladders. In other words, Whip-it parties! We held the exact same kind of parties in high school. We’d buy fourteen cans of Reddi-Wip and suck on them till we had successfully obliterated a couple of million neurons and face-planted on my friend Andy’s couch. And we thought we were so cutting edge. And now, I learn about claque, which is essentially a highbrow French word for canned laughter. Canned laughter was invented long before Lucille Ball stuffed chocolates in her face or Ralph Kramden threatened his wife with extreme violence. It goes back to the 4th century B.C., when Greek playwrights hired bands of helpers to laugh at their comedies in order to influence the judges. The Romans also stacked the audience, but they were apparently more interested in applause than chuckles: Nero—emperor and wannabe musician—employed a group of five thousand knights and soldiers to accompany him on his concert tours. But the golden age of canned laughter came in 19th-century France. Almost every theater in France was forced to hire a band called a claque—from claquer, “to clap.” The influential claque leaders, called the chefs de claque, got a monthly payment from the actors. And the brilliant innovation they came up with was specialization. Each claque member had his or her own important job to perform: There were the rieurs, who laughed loudly during comedies. There were the bisseurs, who shouted for encores. There were the commissaires, who would elbow their neighbors and say, “This is the good part.” And my favorite of all, the pleureuses, women who were paid good francs to weep at the sad parts of tragedies. I love this idea. I’m not sure why the networks never thought of canned crying. You’d be watching an ER episode, and a softball player would come in with a bat splinter through his forehead, and you’d hear a little whimper in the background, turning into a wave of sobs. Julie already has trouble keeping her cheeks dry, seeing as she cried during the Joe Millionaire finale. If they added canned crying, she’d be a mess.

In order to avoid the deafening of conspecifics, some bats employ a jamming avoidance response, rapidly shifting frequencies or flying silent when foraging near conspecifics. Because jamming is a problem facing any active emission sensory system, it is perhaps not surprising (though no less amazing) that similar jamming avoidance responses are deployed by weakly electric fish. The speed of sound is so fast in water that it makes it difficult for echolocating whales to exploit similar Doppler effects. However, the fact that acoustic emissions propagate much farther and faster in the water medium means that there is less attenuation of ultrasound in water, and thus that echolocation can be used for broader-scale 'visual' sweeping of the undersea environment. These constraints and trade-offs must be resolved by all acoustic ISMs, on Earth and beyond. There are equally universal anatomical and metabolic constraints on the evolvability of echolocation that explain why it is 'harder' to evolve than vision. First, as noted earlier, a powerful sound-production capacity, such as the lungs of tetrapods, is required to produce high-frequency emissions capable of supporting high-resolution acoustic imaging. Second, the costs of echolocation are high, which may limit acoustic imaging to organisms with high-metabolisms, such as mammals and birds. The metabolic rates of bats during echolocation, for instance, are up to five times greater than they are at rest. These costs have been offset in bats through the evolutionarily ingenious coupling of sound emission to wing-beat cycle, which functions as a single unit of biomechanical and metabolic efficiency. Sound emission is coupled with the upstroke phase of the wing-beat cycle, coinciding with contraction of abdominal muscles and pressure on the diaphragm. This significantly reduces the price of high-intensity pulse emission, making it nearly costless. It is also why, as any careful crepuscular observer may have noticed, bats spend hardly any time gliding (which is otherwise a more efficient means of flight).

In Classical mythology, righteous wrath was the province of old women. Three very specific old women, in fact: the Furies (or the Erinyes, in Greek). Fragments of myth featuring the Furies are found in the earliest records of ancient Greek culture. These sisters were much more ancient than any of the Olympian deities, indicating the persistence of an older, female-dominated tradition which endured here and there even when later, more patriarchal, mythologies set in. The role of the Furies was to preside over complaints brought to them by humans about behavior that was thought to be intolerable: from lesser misdemeanors such as the insolence of the young to the aged, of children to parents, of hosts to guests — to crimes that were very much worse. It was their role to punish such crimes by relentlessly hounding their perpetrators. The Greek poet Hesiod names the three sisters as Alecto — “unceasing in anger,” the punisher of moral crimes; Megaera — “jealous one,” the punisher of infidelity, oath-breaking, and theft; and Tisiphone — “avenger of murder.” They were, he said, the daughters of Gaea (the goddess who personified the Earth), who conceived them from the blood of her spouse, Uranus, after he had been castrated by his son, Cronos. They lived in the Underworld, and like other chthonic deities, like seeds that lie buried beneath the Earth, they were also identified with its fertility. The wrath of the Furies manifested itself in a number of ways: a tormenting madness would be inflicted on the perpetrator of a patricide or matricide; murderers usually suffered a dire disease, and nations which harbored such criminals could be stricken with famine and plague. The Furies could only be placated with ritual purification, and the completion of a task specifically assigned by them for atonement. It’s important to understand that although the Furies were feared, they were also respected and perceived to be necessary: they represented justice, and were seen to be defenders of moral and legal order. The Furies were portrayed as the foul-smelling, decidedly haggish possessors of bat-like wings, with black snakes adorning their hair, arms, and waists, and blood dripping from their eyes. And they carried brass-studded scourges in their hands. In my menopausal years, I certainly had days when I could have gone with that look. I’m happy to admit that the existence of seriously not-to-be-messed-with elder women like the Furies in our oldest European mythology gives me great pleasure. And it’s difficult not to see them as the perfect menopausal role models, because sudden upwellings of (mostly righteous) anger are a feature of many women’s experience of menopause

So Japan is allied with Germany and they’re like “Sweet the rest of the world already hates us let’s take their land!” So they start invading China and Malaysia and the Philippines and just whatever else but then they’re like “Hmm what if America tries to stop us? Ooh! Let’s surprise attack Hawaii!” So that’s exactly what they do. The attack is very successful but only in a strictly technical sense. To put it in perspective, let’s try a metaphor. Let’s say you’re having a barbecue but you don’t want to get stung by any bees so you find your local beehive and just go crazy on it with a baseball bat. Make sense? THEN YOU MUST BE JAPAN IN THE ’40s. WHO ELSE WOULD EVER DO THIS? So the U.S. swarms on Japan, obviously but that’s where our bee metaphor breaks down because while bees can sting you they cannot put you in concentration camps (or at least, I haven’t met any bees that can do that). Yeah, after that surprise attack on Pearl Harbor everybody on the West Coast is like “OMG WE’RE AT WAR WITH JAPAN AND THERE ARE JAPANESE DUDES LIVING ALLLL AROUND US.” I mean, they already banned Japanese immigration like a decade before but there are still Japanese dudes all over the coast and what’s more those Japanese dudes are living right next door to all the important aircraft factories and landing strips and shipyards and farmland and forests and bridges almost as if those types of things are EVERYWHERE and thus impossible not to live next door to. Whatever, it’s pretty suspicious. Now, at this point, nothing has been sabotaged and some people think that means they’re safe. But not military geniuses like Earl Warren who points out that the only reason there’s been no sabotage is that the Japanese are waiting for their moment and the fact that there has been no sabotage yet is ALL THE PROOF WE NEED to determine that sabotage is being planned. Frank Roosevelt hears this and he’s like “That’s some pretty shaky logic but I really don’t like Japanese people. Okay, go ahead.” So he passes an executive order that just says “Any enemy ex-patriots can be kicked out of any war zone I designate. P.S.: California, Oregon, and Washington are war zones have fun with that.” So they kick all the Japanese off the coast forcing them to sell everything they own but people are still not satisfied. They’re like “Those guys look funny! We can’t have funny-looking dudes roaming around this is wartime! We gotta lock ’em up.” And FDR is like “Okay, sure.” So they herd all the Japanese into big camps where they are concentrated in large numbers like a hundred and ten thousand people total and then the military is like “Okay, guys we will let you go if you fill out this loyalty questionnaire that says you love the United States and are totally down to be in our army” and some dudes are like “Sweet, free release!” but some dudes are like “Seriously? You just put me in jail for being Asian. This country is just one giant asshole and it’s squatting directly over my head.” And the military is like “Ooh, sorry to hear that buddy looks like you’re gonna stay here for the whole war. Meanwhile your friends get to go fight and die FOR FREEDOM.

The translucent, golden punch tastes velvety, voluptuous and not off-puttingly milky. Under its influence, I stage a party for my heroines in my imagination, and in my flat. It's less like the glowering encounter I imagined between Cathy Earnshaw and Flora Poste, and more like the riotous bash in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Not everyone is going to like milk punch. So there are also dirty martinis, and bagels and baklava, and my mother's masafan, Iraqi marzipan. The Little Mermaid is in the bath, with her tail still on, singing because she never did give up her soaring voice. Anne Shirley and Jo March are having a furious argument about plot versus character, gesticulating with ink-stained hands. Scarlett is in the living room, her skirts taking up half the space, trying to show Lizzy how to bat her eyelashes. Lizzy is laughing her head off ut Scarlett has acquired a sense of humour, and doesn't mind a bit. Melanie is talking book with Esther Greenwood, who has brought her baby and also the proofs of her first poetry collection. Franny and Zooey have rolled back the rug and are doing a soft shoe shuffle in rhinestone hats. Lucy Honeychurch is hammering out some Beethoven (in this scenario I have a piano. A ground piano. Well, why not?) Marjorie Morningstar is gossiping about directors with Pauline and Posy Fossil. They've come straight from the shows they're in, till in stage make-up and full of stories. Petrova, in a leather aviator jacket, goggles pushed back, a chic scarf knotted around her neck, is telling the thrilling story of her latest flight and how she fixed an engine fault in mid-air. Mira, in her paint-stained jeans and poncho, is listening, fascinated, asking a thousand questions. Mildred has been persuaded to drink a tiny glass of sherry, then another tiny glass, then another and now she and Lolly are doing a wild, strange dance in the hallway, stamping their feet, their hair flying wild and electric. Lolly's cakes, in the shape of patriarchs she hates, are going down a treat. The Dolls from the Valley are telling Flora some truly scandalous and unrepeatable stories, and she is firmly advising them to get rid of their men and find worthier paramours. Celie is modelling trousers of her own design and taking orders from the Lace women; Judy is giving her a ten-point plan on how to expand her business to an international market. She is quite drunk but nevertheless the plan seems quite coherent, even if it is punctuated by her bellowing 'More leopard print, more leopard print!' Cathy looks tumultuous and on the edge of violent weeping and just as I think she's going to storm out or trash my flat, Jane arrives, late, with an unexpected guest. Cathy turns in anticipation: is it Heathcliff? Once I would have joined her but now I'm glad it isn't him. It's a better surprise. It's Emily's hawk. Hero or Nero. Jane's found him at last, and has him on her arm, perched on her glove; small for a bird of prey, he is dashing and patrician looking, brown and white, observing the room with dark, flinty eyes. When Cathy sees him, she looks at Jane and smiles. And in the kitchen is a heroine I probably should have had when I was four and sitting on my parents' carpet, wishing it would fly. In the kitchen is Scheherazade.

[On Socrates] My decision to prove reincarnation to the sophomoric cavemen of Athens, quite possibly, was the best decision I made for both myself and humanity. Another dominant behavioral trait is displayed by my efforts to perform selfish acts selflessly, which is significantly unique because the majority of people perform selfless acts selfishly. In the former modus operandi the virtue is preserved through the honesty of being selfish, but in the latter the virtue is corrupted by the dishonesty since the intent is disguised to appear virtuous. Therefore, people are the most evil when performing selfish acts selfishly, and would therefore be the most benevolent when performing selfless acts selflessly. To performs acts selfishly for the mere sake of acting, is irresponsible and destructive and to perform acts selflessly for the sake of acting, is reckless and self-destructive. The interesting dynamic of this newest revelation is how Aristotle knew, innately, to seek out Plato upon his father's death. Once Socrates reunited with Plato, as Aristotle, they proved metaphysics; except the trial of Socrates was so traumatizing they made the decision not to make it known. Instead they channeled the knowledge constructively ("selfishly"- because self-preservation is ultimately selfish) which was done selflessly by cultivating it through education. They were so successful, that the King of Macedonia (my father's previous employer) made a formal request ordering me to tutor his son, Alexander. That's interesting because I have memory of Alexander the Great. He was a passionate boy with incredible sex drive that was equal to that of a honey badger's virulence. He allowed his power to intoxicate him and I was the only one he trusted, and when I made the attempt to slow him down by reminding of of the all powerful mighty God, something happened that caused his death and some Athenian imbecile (probably out of guilt) tried to hang me up on a cross for being a traitor. I got the hell of out doge like a bat of hell the minute that fool said something about me not "honoring" the "gods" - I may have even said something to the effect of 'I am God.' Although, the quote that did survive was when I refused to allow Athens to commit the same crime twice prior to fleeing the city to seek sanctuary at a family's estate.

I noticed some scratch marks and faded blood stains high up on a wall. “What happened there?” “An inmate must have tried to escape. I saw a guy use two suction devices like the ones used to carry glass sheets to help lever himself up. He reached half way before being spotted by a blue shirt.” “What happened to him?” “The blue shirt called a guard. He was ordered to come down, but didn’t. They shot him in the leg, he fell and later in the cell, he removed a blade from a disposable razor, slashed his left wrist then wrote a suicide note on the wall with his right hand – in his own blood. Suicide is really common in here and nobody bats an eyelid.

What were you going to make for Christmas dinner?” one of my older children asked in a very reasonable tone. I cleared my throat, but couldn’t speak. There was no real explanation for my behavior. I’d been so intent on getting through this first Christmas without David. I’d found new rituals to replace the old, wrapped gifts, and even made cutout sugar cookies. I’d modified Christmas in order to endure it. What I hadn’t done was plan on or prepare a Christmas meal. Everyone was looking at me expectantly by this point, including my sweet, hungry grandchildren. “I forgot all about Christmas dinner,” I finally admitted. No one batted an eye.

genuine human beings, from Genesis 1 onward, are given the mandate of looking after creation, of bringing order to God’s world, of establishing and maintaining communities. To suppose that we are saved, as it were, for our own private benefit, for the restoration of our own relationship with God (vital though that is!), and for our eventual homecoming and peace in heaven (misleading though that is!) is like a boy being given a baseball bat as a present and insisting that since it belongs to him, he must always and only play with it in private. But of course you can only do what you’re meant to do with a baseball bat when you’re playing with other people.

Early spice traders tried to plant allspice seeds around the world but found them impossible to germinate. Eventually it was discovered that the seeds must pass through the body of a fruit-eating bat, a baldpate pigeon, or some other local bird, in order to be sufficiently heated and softened for germination. Today, through the

Pure and impure--Ritual purity/cleanness or ritual impurity/uncleanness had nothing to do with dirt, grime, germs, and such. Ritual purity/cleaness had to do with boundaries. Such boundaries created order out of chaos (Job 26:10; Psalms 104:9; Proverbs 8:29; and Jeremiah 5:22 among other verses) and so were sacred. Therefore, anything that crossed boundaries threatened order and created impurity/uncleanness. Rituals then must be performed to restore the boundaries and thus order. Such rituals could be as simple as washing with water, or they might be elaborate, involving sacrifices and other ceremonies. Impurity could occur anywhere. Bats, for instance, were in the ancient way of thinking neither bird not mammal. They crossed boundaries and were unclean. Blood should remain within the boundary of the skin. Contact with blood outside the skin created impurity since it had crossed a boundary. Often births and deaths, and always menstrual cycles, created ritual impurity, and that must be rectified by the counter ritual of washing. Nocturnal emissions for men did exactly the same thing, and also required washing.   Back to text

Other than the order, what else can you give me to go bargain with on your behalf when I go into bat for you?” Do you see how the relationship, even in spite of the difficult negotiations, has taken very much of a partnership tone? It’s you and the buyer against the rest of the world, including the Arden Hall gang. Remember, posture and questioning have got us there.

Carry Grip Big Stick Combat is principally composed of three grips: 1) stick grip, in which the right hand grasps the end of the stick; 2) rifle grip, in which the right hand is at the base of the stick, palm down, while the left hand is near the middle of the stick, palm up; and 3) bat grip, in which both hands grip the weapon like a baseball bat, with the left hand over the right. Yet there is another grip, carry grip, that must be considered. Unless you need a cane in order to walk, you will typically carry the baseball bat, cane, or long stick in the middle, grasped by your right hand if you're right-handed. It is important to train to strike automatically and non-telegraphically from carry grip, especially if you are attacked by surprise. Cover and Hit You are holding the stick in carry grip, with the right hand at the balance point near the middle of the stick. An attacker swings with his right hand at your head. Bear in mind that his “punch” might be a beer bottle, a set of brass knuckles, or a knife, so it is best to crouch down to try to evade it completely. Raise up your left elbow, placing your left palm over your left ear. This is a multipurpose shield of your head. Swing the end of the weapon into the opponent's groin. Strike repeatedly into his groin and midsection as necessary. To follow up, grab the base of the stick with the left hand. You are now in rifle grip, only in reverse, with the right hand forward and the left at the pommel. If you slide the right hand down into bat grip you will be in the traditional right-over-left grip. Although these grips are the opposite of what I have taught in the book so far, I believe it is best not to shuffle the hands. I believe your first priority is not to lose your weapon! I refer to the right hand grip at the base of the weapon as “anchor grip,” because it is firm and permanently fixed. No matter how the left hand moves, the right always maintains a solid grip. I have rejected the grip shifting of other styles because I want to avoid at all costs losing the weapon, particularly under the stress of combat. Crotch Lift This technique is a natural follow-up to the preceding Cover and Hit. This can also be used as a follow-up to the low thrust, the very first technique in the book. The crotch lift can also be used in close-quarters grappling. Pass the stick between the opponent's legs, high up near his crotch. You may naturally find yourself in this position after a thrust to the groin. Reach around the opponent's back with your left hand and seize the end of the stick, palm up. Bend your knees and lift the opponent by straightening your legs and lifting with both arms. Arch your head and body to the right in order to dump him. If he falls with a leg still entangled, you can squeeze in on the weapon in a crushing technique.

But what is it about bats? I asked. Why do so many of these zoonotic viruses—or what seems like so many—spill over onto humans from the chiropteran order of mammals? Or is that the wrong question? “It is the right question,” he said. “But I don’t think there’s a good answer for it yet.

This is similar to the Twister technique, in that you are using a two-handed grip on the big stick in order to duplicate the sudden redirection of short stick abaniko, or fan, technique. Start in right high guard with the stick resting over your right shoulder. Throw an overight, then suddenly change direction so that the stick travels 180 degrees in the opposite direction, striking the opponent in the knee or groin with an underleft. It helps to step out to the right with your right foot to clear a path for the second strike. Suddenly pull the left hand back and downward, like pulling a lever, while simultaneously pushing forward and upward with the right. One possible application is to draw the opponent's left hand up to block your overight strike, then drop down to strike at the opening created at his knee or groin. Practice this technique on the heavy bag, striving to make both strikes as powerful and as close together as possible.

Two Yemeni Jews, Hannah and Saadya Akiva, gave a similarly bleak account of Yemen in the aftermath of the Second World War. Speaking to the historian Bat Ye’or, they recalled how it was forbidden for a Jew to work in agriculture, to write in Arabic, to possess firearms, or to ride on a horse or a camel. Jews could only ride on donkeys, and even then they were obliged to ride sidesaddle in order to jump to the ground whenever they passed a Muslim–as in the early days of the Covenant of Omar more than 1,200 years earlier. In the streets in Yemen, Jewish pedestrians had to pass Muslims on the left. Although Jewish cobblers made shoes for Muslims, they were not allowed to wear them. Hannah and Saadya Akiva explained: ‘The Arabs forbade us to wear shoes, so that we hid them when, as children, we went searching for wood for cooking. When we were far enough away, we put on our shoes; on returning we took them off and hid them in the branches. The Arabs frequently searched us, and if they found them, they punished us and forbade us to collect wood. We had to lower our heads, accepting insults and humiliations. The Arabs called us

The Yankees handed out numbers based upon a player’s spot in the batting order, which is how Babe Ruth acquired the number 3. His teammate, Lou Gehrig, hit cleanup, and his number, 4, became the first ever retired by any team on July 4, 1939, the day he called himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.

Try these journal prompts as you work to integrate your type 8 shadows: See yourself through your ex’s eyes. This can be a difficult exercise, but if anyone’s up for it, Challenger, it’s you. Write a letter to yourself from your ex’s point of view. Take a moment to remember all you did wrong and write it down—even if (especially if!) you think the failure of the relationship was their fault, not yours. What negative traits of yours do you need to own and master to be better in your next relationship? Write a letter to the person who hurt you the most in your past. Tell them everything they did that made you feel unworthy of love or less-than. Don’t be afraid to hit below the belt! Get it all out! When you’re done, put the letter away somewhere safe. Come back and re-read it two weeks later and consider whether you can see any of the negative qualities of this person in yourself. How have you hurt others? Is it similar to the way you’ve been hurt? Think about the people you love most. If you had the power, what would you like to change about them in order to improve your relationship with them? (This might also have to do with the way you resolve conflicts.) How does this action reflect on you? Based on this exercise, is there anything you might consider improving in yourself to help? TYPE 8 SELF-CARE PRESCRIPTION Type 8s tend to struggle with inaction when it comes to self-care. Since you’re always seeking progress and pushing yourself, it’s challenging for you to sit in a quiet place alone and rest. But the world is a complicated place, and you are prone to feeling angry about the things you can’t control or change. You want so much to do something to heal the pain of the world, to fix the broken systems. But you can’t fight for others until you’ve first fought for yourself by releasing the need for control and choosing stillness. Being still probably feels unnatural to you, even scary, but that’s where your real inner work begins! Learn your limits. As an energetic 8, you frequently push yourself to your limits, even if you’re unaware you’re doing so. Pay closer attention to your own feelings, and force yourself to rest and recover whenever necessary, instead of pushing through. You’ll be much better off for it! Practice mindful breathing for anger management. When you feel the need to let loose with an angry tirade, take it as a cue to practice your calming breaths. Find an outdoor exercise activity you love. When you’re feeling especially furious or antsy, hop on your bike and go for a ride or do a few laps around the neighborhood. These activities are healthy outlets for that restless energy of yours. Let others take the lead sometimes. With your commanding presence and direct approach, you make a natural leader. But sometimes, you need to step back and allow someone else to step up to bat. Take a break and learn not to carry all responsibilities on your own shoulders; this will benefit both you and your relationships with others.

I could use an assistant, if you don’t want him.” Rosie batted her long eyelashes at Emerson, who stood a head taller. If he’s not careful, he really will become her prey. But Rosie was the perfect person to keep him distracted. “I’m not sure if we can trust him. The last email the order sent was rather threatening.” Lucy sharpened her tone to see how he would react. Maybe he’d reveal a harsher side when threatened. “I’m only here to help; I’m sorry if our head office weren’t as understanding about the complexity of work such as yours,” he said, his tone assertive but apologetic.

The sweet spot is a term used by audiophiles and recording engineers to describe the focal point between two sources of sound, where an individual is fully capable of hearing the audio mix the way it was intended to be heard by the musicians. Different static methods exist to broaden the area of the sweet spot. Sound engineers also refer to the sweet spot of any sound-producing body that may be captured with a microphone. Every individual instrument and voice has its own sweet spot, the perfect location to place the microphone or microphones in order to obtain the best sound. In tennis, baseball, or cricket, a given swing will result in a more powerful impact if the ball strikes the racquet or bat on the sweet spot, where a combination of factors results in a maximum response for a given amount of effort. The actual sweet spot on a racquet or bat is a very small area, where dispersing vibrations and spin in multiple directions are canceled out, resulting in a perfect contact point between incoming and outgoing energies.

Werner Heisenberg Walks into a Bar Werner Heisenberg walks into a bar. The bartender asks, 'What will you have? Heisenberg ponders the question for 30 seconds and says, 'I'm still uncertain. There is a fuzziness in nature, a fundamental limit to what I can know about the behavior of quantum particles in the liquor in that shot glass. On these subatomic scales, the most I can hope for is to calculate probabilities for where the liquor is and how it will behave once it enters my bloodstream.' The bartender says, 'Listen egghead, stop your jabbering. This is not rocket science. Either order a drink or get the fuck out of my bar.' Heisenberg leaves in frustration and at that very moment, in walks the rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun. The bartender grabs his bat from behind the bar and says to himself, 'Achh scheiße, here comes trouble.

The body creates heat in a process called thermogenesis. One method is shivering, when muscle fibers quickly contract in order to generate heat. When shivering isn’t sufficient, the body turns to specialized fat cells called brown adipose tissue (BAT). BAT gain their color from containing many mitochondria (used to produce heat), in contrast with the more common and familiar white adipose tissue. In some ways, it may be useful to think of BAT as a muscle—one that grows stronger with use and atrophies without it. The great thing about BAT is that it turns directly to body fat as a source of fuel. Short of liposuction, thermogenesis is probably the fastest way to reduce body fat.

Do you still have the tux you wore as Boudini?” “It’s in the loft at the cabin. Why?” “You’ll need it in order to pose as a server. Unless you’d rather be a male companion?” “No thanks.” An evil little part of me is dying to say he has more experience as a companion, given his time with Prudence, but I bat it down.

Wrath bared his fangs. “John, as God is my fucking witness, I will cut you if you don’t—” “Easy, there, big guy,” V gritted out. “I’m going to translate. You want to hit the library where we can—” “No, I want to fucking know where my shellan is!” Wrath boomed. John started signing, and whereas most of the time people translated half sentences sequentially, V waited until he’d finished the whole report. A couple of the Brothers muttered in the background as they shook their heads. “In the library,” V ordered the King in a way John never could have. “You’re gonna wanna do this in the library.” Wrong thing to say. Wrath wheeled on the Brother and went for him with such speed and accuracy no one was prepared: One minute V was standing next to the King; the next he was defending himself against an attack that was as unprovoked as it was . . . well, vicious. And then things went shit-wild. Like Wrath knew he was on the thin edge of a bad ledge, he broke off from V, and went total wrecking ball on the billiards room. The first thing he ran into was the pool table Butch was chilling next to—and there was barely any time for the cop to get that ashtray up off the side rails: Wrath grabbed the gunnels and flipped the thing like it was nothing but a card table, the mahogany and slate-topped behemoth flying up so high, it wiped out the hanging light fixture above, its weight so great it splintered the marble floor beneath on landing. Without missing a breath, the King EF5’d into his next victim . . . the heavy leather sofa that Rhage had just leaped up off. Talk about your couch-icopters. The entire thing came at John at about five feet off the floor, the pair of ends trading places as it spun around and around, cushions flying in all directions. He didn’t take it personally—especially as its mate do-si-doed with the bar, smashing the top-shelf bottles, liquor splashing all over the walls, the floor, the fire that was crackling in the hearth. Wrath wasn’t finished. The King picked up a side table, hauled it overhead, and pitched it in the direction of the TV. It missed the plasma screen, but managed to shatter an old-fashioned mirror—although the Sony didn’t last. The coffee table that had been in between the two sofas did that deed, killing the muted image of the two Boston guys and the old man from Southie with the baseball bat shilling for DirectTV. The Brothers just let Wrath go. It wasn’t that they were afraid of getting hurt. Hell, Rhage stepped in and caught the first couch before it tore a hunk off of the archway’s molding. They just weren’t stupid. Wrath - Beth x Overnight = Psycho-hose Beast

Help me,” the girl pleaded softly. Sam knelt beside her. He recoiled in shock. “Bette?” The left side of Bouncing Bette’s face was covered in blood. There was a gash above her temple. She was panting, gasping, like she had collapsed after a marathon and was trying with her last ounce of energy to crawl across the finish line. “Bette, what happened?” “They’re trying to get me,” Bette cried, and clutched at Sam’s arm. The three dark figures advanced to the edge of the circle of light. One was clearly Orc. No one else was that big. Edilio and Quinn moved into the garage doorway. Sam disengaged from Bette and took up a position beside Edilio. “You want me to beat on you guys, I will!” Orc yelled. “What’s going on here?” Sam demanded. He narrowed his eyes and recognized the other two boys, a kid named Karl, a seventh grader from school, and Chaz, one of the Coates eighth graders. All three were armed with aluminum bats. “This isn’t your business,” Chaz said. “We’re dealing with something here.” “Dealing with what? Orc, did you hit Bette?” “She was breaking the rules,” Orc said. “You hit a girl, man?” Edilio said, outraged. “Shut up, wetback,” Orc said. “Where’s Howard?” Sam asked, just to stall while he tried to figure out what to do. He’d lost one fight to Orc already. Orc took the question as an insult. “I don’t need Howard to handle you, Sam.” Orc marched right up to Sam, stopped a foot away, and put his bat on his shoulder like he was ready to swing for a home run. Like a batter ready for the next fastball. Only this was closer to T-ball: Sam’s head was impossible to miss. “Move, Sam,” Orc ordered. “Okay, I’m not doing this again,” Quinn said. “Let him have her, Sam.” “Ain’t no ‘let me,’” Orc said. “I do what I want.” Sam noticed movement behind Orc. There were people coming down the street, twenty or more kids. Orc noticed it too, and glanced behind him. “They aren’t going to save you,” Orc said, and swung the bat hard. Sam ducked. The bat whooshed past his head, and Orc rotated halfway around, carried forward by the momentum. Sam was thrown off balance, but Edilio was ready. He let loose a roar and plowed headfirst into Orc. Edilio was maybe half Orc’s size, but Orc was knocked off his feet. He sprawled out on the concrete. Chaz went after Edilio, trying to pull him off Orc. The crowd of kids who had come running down the street surged forward. There were angry voices and threats, all aimed at Orc. They yelled, Sam noted, but no one exactly jumped into the unequal fight.

The order Chiroptera (the “hand-wing” creatures) encompasses 1,116 species, which amounts to 25 percent of all the recognized species of mammals. To say again: One in every four species of mammal is a bat. Such

All right, I’ll play. What are some of the symptoms of OSS?” “Oh, there are plenty. Especially when a parental figure is missing from the equation.” “Enlighten me.” She swirled the bat back and forth between the palms of her hands. “Well, for starters, you are extremely reliable and find yourself responsible for your siblings. Almost as if they are your own kids, seeing how you helped raise them.” I narrowed my brows. “Go on.” “You are overly protective over your family and go out of your way to make sure everyone’s okay. You’re a workaholic. You put your own wants and needs on the back burner in order to make sure everyone else is good. You let your dreams sit on the sidelines if it makes sure others are happier.” My mouth twitched a little. She was hitting a little too close to home. I took the bat from her and grabbed a ball from the bag. I tossed it up and swung, hitting the ball into the distance. “Go on,” I said. She took the bat from me and stepped onto the plate. “You suffer from a hyper-independence, which seems like a good thing, but it’s not.” She tossed a ball up and knocked it out. “It’s actually a trauma response because you feel like you can’t rely on others, seeing how it was always your job to be the reliable source.” “Too loud, Coach.” She handed the bat back to me. We switched positions. “You also worry about messing up and letting people down. Which is why you are so achievement-oriented,” she explained. I hit the next ball. She whistled low. “Nice hit.” “Thanks.” I flicked my thumb against the bridge of my nose. “So with this OSS, what’s the treatment plan?” She shrugged. “Don’t know. Still trying to figure that out myself. Because as someone suffering with OSS, I know that we hate all eyes on us, and we hate the thought of people worrying about us because it shows that we aren’t as strong as we should be, and we should always be strong.” She took the bat from me and performed another hit. “But I think it helps to struggle in numbers. Makes it a little easier to breathe.” “Are you suggesting we start an OSS club?

Special discounts to Hogwarts students who swear they’re going to use our products to get rid of this old bat,

In order to survive You must acquire much wisdom This planet is a place You can’t show your true face The solutions aren’t simple Leaving you in a state Of outrage and disappointment Disgusted by humanity’s fate Contents of our heart Will never be important People look at your presentation Sincerity lost in translation We often get told the same story That we can choose happiness What is the chance of that Flying around blind as a bat It’s true, vanity is everywhere Labeling success by our looks Wish I didn’t feel this drained But my depth is what rained Crystal ball, crystal ball What can you tell me Do you think I’ll have a chance To finally be free

Call off your overgrown bat,” Beron ordered Rhys.

The second, much larger group of “motors” includes all organic or mechanical arrangements that move bodies in a more complex fashion than the “motors” of the first category, which simply push or pull loads linearly. Although this second category ranges across ten orders of magnitude—from flying insects and bats, through birds and running and swimming mammals, to electric motors and piston and jet engines—the maximum force output of all of these motors scales at an almost perfectly isometric rate (M1.0), with exponents of 1.08 for electric rotary motors and bats, 0.96 for flying birds and aircraft turbines, and 0.95 for running animals!

In 1962, the San Francisco Giants were preparing to host the LA Dodgers for a crucial three-game series, late in the season. The Dodgers, led by master base stealer Maury Wills, were five and a half games ahead of the Giants. Before the series began, the Giants manager approached Matty Schwab, the team’s head groundskeeper, and asked if anything could be done—wink wink—to slow down Wills. “Dad and I were out at Candlestick before dawn the day the series was to begin,” said Jerry Schwab, Matty’s son, as quoted by Noel Hynd in Sports Illustrated. “We were installing a speed trap.” Hynd continues: Working by torchlight, the Schwabs dug up and removed the topsoil where Wills would take his lead off first base. Down in its place went a squishy swamp of sand, peat moss and water. Then they covered their chicanery with an inch of normal infield soil, making the 5- by 15-foot quagmire visually indistinguishable from the rest of the base path. The Dodgers were not fooled. When the team began batting practice, the players and coaches noticed the quicksand, and so did the umpire, who ordered it removed. Schwab and the grounds crew came out with wheelbarrows, shoveled up the mixture, and returned soon after with reloaded wheelbarrows. It was the same bog. They’d just mixed in some new dirt, which made it even looser. Somehow the umpires were satisfied. Then Matty Schwab ordered his son to water the infield. Generously. By the time the game started, there was basically a swamp between first and second base. (“They found two abalone under second base,” wrote an irritated Los Angeles sports columnist.) Maury Wills, en route to an MVP season, stole no bases, and neither did his teammates, and the Giants won, 11–2. Pleased, the Schwab father-son team continued to conjure more marshy conditions, and the Giants swept the Dodgers—and went on to leapfrog them to win the National League pennant. There’s something admirably mischievous about this story. I mean, it’s cheating, let’s be clear, but it’s cheeky cheating. It’s fun to think that the father-son groundskeeping team pulled one over on the National League’s MVP. The underdogs won one—they tilted the odds in favor of their home team.

Bats come in many, many forms. The order Chiroptera (the “hand-wing” creatures) encompasses 1,116 species, which amounts to 25 percent of all the recognized species of mammals. To say again: One in every four species of mammal is a bat. Such diversity might suggest that bats don’t harbor more than their share of viruses; it could be, instead, that their viral burden is proportional to their share of all mammal diversity, and thus just seems surprisingly large.

Because it was part of old Gondwana and because it is insular and was isolated for tens of millions of years, New Zealand has a quirky evolutionary history. There seems to have been no mammalian stock from which to evolve on the Gondwanan fragment, and so, until the arrival of humans, there were no terrestrial mammals, nor were there any of the curious marsupials of nearby Australia—no wombats or koalas or kangaroos, no rodents or ruminants, no wild cats or dogs. The only mammals that could reach New Zealand were those that could swim (like seals) or fly (like bats), and even then there are questions about how the bats got there. Two of New Zealand’s three bat species are apparently descended from a South American bat, which, it is imagined, must have been blown across the Pacific in a giant prehistoric storm. Among New Zealand’s indigenous plants and animals are a number of curious relics, including a truly enormous conifer and a lizard-like creature that is the world’s only surviving representative of an order so ancient it predates many dinosaurs. But the really odd thing about New Zealand is what happened to the birds. In the absence of predators and competitors, birds evolved to fill all the major ecological niches, becoming the “ecological equivalent of giraffes, kangaroos, sheep, striped possums, long-beaked echidnas and tigers.” Many of these birds were flightless, and some were huge. The largest species of moa—a now extinct flightless giant related to the ostrich, the emu, and the rhea—stood nearly twelve feet tall and weighed more than five hundred pounds. The moa was an herbivore, but there were also predators among these prehistoric birds, including a giant eagle with claws like a panther’s. There were grass-eating parrots and flightless ducks and birds that grazed like sheep in alpine meadows, as well as a little wren-like bird that scampered about the underbrush like a mouse. None of these creatures were seen by the first Europeans to reach New Zealand, for two very simple reasons. The first is that many of them were already extinct. Although known to have survived long enough to coexist with humans, all twelve species of moa, the Haast’s eagle, two species of adzebills, and many others had vanished by the mid-seventeenth century, when Europeans arrived. The second is that, even if there had still been moas lumbering about the woods, the European discoverers of New Zealand would have missed them because they never actually set foot on shore.

The existence of several examples of intelligence designed under these constraints should give us great confidence that we can achieve the same in short order. The situation is analogous to the history of heavier than air flight, where birds, bats and insects clearly demonstrated the possibility before our culture mastered it.

Nus believes he can make a more useful contribution to the leaders he serves if he has fewer distractions, some time to think, to experiment, to shape decisions and outcomes. While the A is fighting fires, batting today’s questions and barking tomorrow’s orders, the C can reflect on next week’s – or next year’s – agenda, separating the important from the urgent.

Witches don't do that sort of thing anymore! In the old days they even used to have to go out and catch their own bats and toads and stuff to make their powders out of. Now it all comes out of bottles.'...'My mother sends for everything from the Witches' Market. That's located near the Never-Never Land. They send her a catalogue and she orders from that.

She loved the order and the certainty the Church gave her life, arranging the seasons for her, the weeks and the days, guiding her philosophies and her sorrows. She loved the hymns. She loved the prayers. She loved the way the Church--the priests and the Brothers and the nuns, as well as the handy threat of eternal damnation--ordered her disorderly children. But holiness bored her. She liked chaos, busyness, bustling. She liked a household strewn with clothes and dust and magazines and books, jump ropes, baseball bats, milk bottles. She like the sight and smell of overflowing ashtrays, of a man who's had a few drinks, of tabletops crowded with cloudy glasses. She loved falling into an unmade bed at the end of the long day, falling in beside her snoring husband--with maybe a child or two snagged in the covers--and never reaching, because sleep overtook her, the part of the Hail Mary that said: Now and at the hour of our death.

Storm Catechism" The gods are rinsing their just-boiled pasta in a colander, which is why it is humid and fitfully raining down here in the steel sink of mortal life. Sometimes you can smell the truffle oil and hear the ambrosia being knocked back, sometimes you catch a drift of laughter in that thunder crack: Zeus knocking over his glass, spilling lightning into a tree. The tree shears away from itself and falls on a car, killing a high school girl. Or maybe it just crashes down on a few trash cans, and the next day gets cut up and hauled away by the city. Either way, hilarity. The gods are infinitely perfect as is their divine mac and cheese. Where does macaroni come from? Where does matter? Why does the cat act autistic when you call her, then bat a moth around for an hour, watching intently as it drags its wings over the area rug? The gods were here first, and they're bigger. They always were, and always will be living it up in their father's mansion. You only crawled from the drain a few millennia ago, after inventing legs for yourself so you could stand, inventing fists in order to raise them and curse the heavens. Do the gods see us? Will the waters be rising soon? The waters will be rising soon. Find someone or something to cling to.

In 1929, the defending world champion New York Yankees and Cleveland Indians became the first team to wear permanent numbers sewn into the backs of their uniforms. Starting players were given numbers that matched their usual place in the batting order.

The Fangs gathered at the bottom of the bank and ordered the trolls back. The Fangs seemed worried that the children might somehow get pushed over the falls in the fight if they advanced too quickly, so they proceeded with caution. More Fangs appeared, and they organized themselves into ranks. Meanwhile, the trolls knelt like children at the river’s edge and ran their fingers through the speeding water. When daggerfish leapt, the giggling trolls batted them out into the rapids.

Mona sat watching them, two weird figures in the uncertain light. as they wrestled with the reluctant charcoal in the censer. Then Jelkes rose upright and whirled the thing on its yard-long clashing chains round and round his head. clouds of smoke and showers of sparks flying in every direction; his enormous shadow stretched far across the vaulting of the roof. grotesque and demoniac, the cloak of his ulster flapping like the wings of a bat. Hugh, his face invisible in the shadow of his cowl, stood silently watching him. Mona clutched the arms of her chair, her heart beating in her throat and nearly suffocating her. Jelkes and Hugh, tall men in any case, looked enormous in the uncertain light. Hugh was in very deed the renegade monk returned from the tomb; Jelkes a being of another order of creation altogether.

The order Chiroptera (the “hand-wing” creatures) encompasses 1,116 species, which amounts to 25 percent of all the recognized species of mammals. To say again: One in every four species of mammal is a bat.

The notion that international competition – the battle between one arbitrary, bordered landmass and another – is not political, is a fatuous notion. But even in that context, cricket is different, its fierceness of a different order to that in almost every other sport. The story of the game is the story of civilisation, its old rivalries based on more than simple you and me, us and them dichotomies, its various antipathies rooted not in sport but actual, real things, a narrative with a genuine moral dimension.

D.A. I got my orders—either the recordings and the witness’ name, or I put a slug in you where it’ll do the most good.

Mate, I’ve only been here for a few weeks, but I don’t think anyone even knows my name. I’ve already slipped three spots down the batting order. I’ve got no idea what the lyrics to the club song are. And every time I get a hit at training, I hear the faint sound of blokes whispering that one word under their breath: “Yuck.” What am I doing wrong?’ I began, nervously. Nuggsy paused, took a long swig of his Reschs schooner, and reclined languidly into his seat. He scratched his bald head for a moment, seemingly in deep thought, before embarking on the long-winded response that would indeed shape my cricketing future. ‘Listen, bud. You’re a grade cricketer now. And it’s time you learned a little bit about what that means. This isn’t club cricket, “Shires” cricket, or that stupid school shit that you wasted your time on for all those years. This is grade cricket: the highest level of amateur cricket in the world,’ he said with pride. Just for those who don’t already know, I should quickly provide a bit of background on the grade cricket competition. Grade cricket (or ‘Premier cricket’, as it is known in some states/territories) is the level directly below the state competition.  Despite this close proximity to the professional arena, it is nonetheless an amateur competition. Sure, one or two first graders might get paid a little bit under the table, but everyone else must pay a registration fee in order to play. Normally, each club has four to five grades — first grade being the strongest; fifth grade the weakest. Those in first grade enjoy a status that the fifth graders can only dream about. Being a first grader is like being a celebrity to 50 blokes whose names you’ll never know — or never even need to know — unless you end up playing with them after a severe run of poor form (or a serious disciplinary breach). The rest of the club — seconds, thirds, and fourth grade — is basically an assortment of talented youngsters and ageing desperates. The common denominator between the young and old brigade is that they were all once told they were ‘good enough to play for Australia’. In many cases, it was the first and last compliment they ever received — and the reason why they’re still playing. In all cases, it was the worst thing that could have ever happened to them. The ultimate grade cricketer, therefore, will possess the perfect balance of good and not good enough that will haunt them for all of their playing days. All this of course, is something that can only be learned with experience. At this early stage in my grade cricket career, I considered these young players to be ‘cool’ and the older players worthy of my respect. Nuggsy tilted his head to one side as he lit up a cigarette. He took a deep drag, holding it in for what seemed like hours, before launching his head back to expel a thick plume of smoke towards the ceiling. ‘Listen, great man,’ he began. ‘Success in grade cricket has nothing to do with skill, ability, or even results. It’s all about the social ladder, bud. You’ve got the big dogs up top, the peasants down the bottom, and everyone in between is just trying to stay relevant,’ he offered. In many ways, grade cricket social hierarchy bears great similarity to the feudal systems that first appeared in the Middle Ages in Europe — something I’d learned a bit about at high school. As I remembered, kings and monarchs sat at the top, enjoying their pick of the land, women and food. They were the ones who established the rules that everyone had to live under. The barons leased their land from the king; the knights leased their land from the barons; and the knights granted the lowly peasants their land.  The peasants were not allowed to marry, nor could they even leave the manor without permission. Basically, they were the fifth graders of the 8-12th Century.

For Frege, an account of what it is for a purely logical power to be in act suffices to allow us to achieve a proper philosophical appreciation of what “content,” “object,” “thought,” “judgment,” and “truth,” as such, are. These notions come to be fully in place through an elucidation of that power, considered apart from our capacity to arrive at kinds of knowledge that are not purely logical in content. Our capacity for empirical judgment, when it comes into view, will come into view as a comparatively complex joint exercise of a variety of faculties, in which the logically fundamental notions that figure in its explication (“content,” “object,” thought,” “judgment,” “truth”) are still supposed to retain the specific sense originally conferred upon them in our explication of the purely logical case, while allowing for their extension to logically impure cases of thought and proposition. A certain picture of the role of reflection on the purely logical case, inthe order of explication of kinds of knowledge, is at work here—a picture that has been enormously influential on the subsequent development of analytic philosophy. On this picture, only if we are armed with a prior account of the case of purely logical thought, supplementing it as we go along, can we come to understand what empirically contentful theoretical thought (or practical thought) is. On this picture, the spatiotemporal bearing and the self-consciousness of the thinking subject do not belong to the form of thought (and hence their treatment does not belong, as Kant held, to a suitably capacious conception of philosophical logic); rather, all such further details among various species of thought are to be subsequently specified, if at all, through the introduction of further indices figuring within the content of thought. (Thoughts are simply conceived of as occurring at a time or at a person.) These consequences of the Fregean picture are not, on the whole, something for which post-Fregean analytic philosophers argue. Rather, it involves an entire philosophical picture that is simply tacitly, and largely unwittingly, assumed—a picture that is already under attack, albeit in very different ways, in both Kant and early Wittgenstein. According to this post-Fregean picture, we can furnish an account of the wider reaches of our capacity for finite theoretical cognition only by assuming the prior intelligibility of some self- standing account of how one of the ingredient capacities in empirical cognition—the capacity for logical thought—off its own bat is able to yield a delimitable sphere of truth-evaluable, object-related thoughts with judgable content, without its yet having entered into any form of co- operation with our other cognitive capacities.

You remind me of something that happened in our book department the other day. A flapper came in and said she had forgotten the name of the book she wanted, but it was something about a young man who had been brought up by the monks. I was stumped. I tried her with The Cloister and the Hearth and Monastery Bells and Legends of the Monastic Orders and so on, but her face was blank. Then one of the salesgirls overheard us talking, and she guessed it right off the bat. Of course it was Tarzan.

The new world Order! Agree 100% with Trump….The flow rate of the toilet cisterns is small!!! It needs to increase!!! Humanity can’t clean up its own shit…. I support!!! I will add, the Universe is a full toilet, but there is no one to flush the water….Bat Roscoe the Cleaner

The orders resting on BATS were typically just the 100-share minimum required for an order to be at the front of any price queue, as their only purpose was to tease information out of investors.

Jasra smiled almost coquettishly, and I’d swear she batted her eyelashes at him. While he makes a striking appearance with that white shock of hair, I don’t know that you’d exactly call Mandor handsome. I’ve never understood why women are as attracted to him as they usually seem to be. I’ve even checked him out for spells on that particular count, but he doesn’t wear one. It must be some different order of magic entirely.