“
Princes & Kings
Isn't it strange how princes and kings,
and clowns that caper in sawdust rings,
and common people, like you and me,
are builders for eternity?
Each is given a list of rules;
a shapeless mass; a bag of tools.
And each must fashion, ere life is flown,
A stumbling block, or a Stepping-Stone.
”
”
R. Lee Sharpe
“
Why do you lie" I ask her.
"To block the truth."
Fair enough.
Naomi goes on. "Where did we get it in our heads that we need truth all the time? Sometimes lies are nice, you know? You don't have to know the truth all the time. It's too exhausting.
”
”
Rachel Cohn (Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List)
“
From Jess:
FANG.
I've commented your blog with my questions for THREE YEARS. You answer other people's STUPID questions but not MINE. YOU REALLY ASKED FOR IT, BUDDY. I'm just gonna comment with this until you answer at least one of my questions.
DO YOU HAVE A JAMAICAN ACCENT? No, Mon
DO YOU MOLT? Gross.
WHAT'S YOUR STAR SIGN? Dont know. "Angel what's my star sign?" She says Scorpio.
HAVE YOU TOLD JEB I LOVE HIM YET? No.
DOES NOT HAVING A POWER MAKE YOU ANGRY? Well, that's not really true...
DO YOU KNOW HOW TO DO THE SOULJA BOY? Can you see me doing the Soulja Boy?
DOES IGGY KNOW HOW TO DO THE SOULJA BOY? Gazzy does.
DO YOU USE HAIR PRODUCTS? No. Again,no.
DO YOU USE PRODUCTS ON YOUR FEATHERS? I don't know that they make bird kid feather products yet.
WHAT'S YOU FAVORITE MOVIE? There are a bunch
WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE SONG? I don't have favorites. They're too polarizing.
WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE SMELL? Max, when she showers.
DO THESE QUESTIONS MAKE YOU ANGRY? Not really.
IF I CAME UP TO YOU IN A STREET AND HUGGED YOU, WOULD YOU KILL ME? You might get kicked. But I'm used to people wanting me dead, so.
DO YOU SECRETLY WANT TO BE HUGGED? Doesn't everybody?
ARE YOU GOING EMO 'CAUSE ANGEL IS STEALING EVERYONE'S POWERS (INCLUDING YOURS)? Not the emo thing again.
WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE FOOD? Anything hot and delicious and brought to me by Iggy.
WHAT DID YOU HAVE FOR BREAKFAST THIS MORNING? Three eggs, over easy. Bacon. More Bacon. Toast.
DID YOU EVEN HAVE BREAKFAST THIS MORNING? See above.
DID YOU DIE INSIDE WHEN MAX CHOSE ARI OVER YOU? Dudes don't die inside.
DO YOU LIKE MAX? Duh.
DO YOU LIKE ME? I think you're funny.
DOES IGGY LIKE ME? Sure
DO YOU WRITE DEPRESSING POETRY? No.
IS IT ABOUT MAX? Ahh. No.
IS IT ABOUT ARI? Why do you assume I write depressing poetry?
IS IT ABOUT JEB? Ahh.
ARE YOU GOING TO BLOCK THIS COMMENT? Clearly, no.
WHAT ARE YOU WEARING? A Dirty Projectors T-shirt. Jeans.
DO YOU WEAR BOXERS OR BRIEFS? No freaking comment.
DO YOU FIND THIS COMMENT PERSONAL? Could I not find that comment personal?
DO YOU WEAR SUNGLASSES? Yes, cheap ones.
DO YOU WEAR YOUR SUNGLASSES AT NIGHT? That would make it hard to see.
DO YOU SMOKE APPLES, LIKE US? Huh?
DO YOU PREFER BLONDES OR BRUNETTES? Whatever.
DO YOU LIKE VAMPIRES OR WEREWOLVES? Fanged creatures rock.
ARE YOU GAY AND JUST PRETENDING TO BE STRAIGHT BY KISSING LISSA? Uhh...
WERE YOU EXPERIMENING WITH YOUR SEXUALITY? Uhh...
WOULD YOU TELL US IF YOU WERE GAY? Yes.
DO YOU SECRETLY LIKE IT WHEN PEOPLE CALL YOU EMO? No.
ARE YOU EMO? Whatever.
DO YOU LIKE EGGS? Yes. I had them for breakfast.
DO YOU LIKE EATING THINGS? I love eating. I list it as a hobby.
DO YOU SECRETLY THINK YOU'RE THE SEXIEST PERSON IN THE WHOLE WORLD? Do you secretly think I'm the sexiest person in the whole world?
DO YOU EVER HAVE DIRTY THOUGHTS ABOUT MAX? Eeek!
HAS ENGEL EVER READ YOUR MIND WHEN YOU WERE HAVING DIRTY THOUGHT ABOUT MAX AND GONE "OMG" AND YOU WERE LIKE "D:"? hahahahahahahahahahah
DO YOU LIKE SPONGEBOB? He's okay, I guess.
DO YOU EVER HAVE DIRTY THOUGHT ABOUT SPONGEBOB? Definitely
CAN YOU COOK? Iggy cooks.
DO YOU LIKE TO COOK? I like to eat.
ARE YOU, LIKE, A HOUSEWIFE? How on earth could I be like a housewife?
DO YOU SECRETLY HAVE INNER TURMOIL?
Isn't it obvious?
DO YOU WANT TO BE UNDA DA SEA? I'm unda da stars.
DO YOU THINK IT'S NOT TOO LATE, IT'S NEVER TOO LATE? Sure.
WHERE DID YOU LEARN TO PLAY POKER? TV.
DO YOU HAVE A GOOD POKER FACE? Totally.
OF COURSE YOU HAVE A GOOD POKER FACE. DOES IGGY HAVE A GOOD POKER FACE? Yes.
CAN HE EVEN PLAY POKER? Iggy beats me sometimes.
DO YOU LIKE POKING PEOPLE HARD? Not really.
ARE YOU FANGALICIOUS? I could never be as fangalicious as you'd want me to be.
Fly on,
Fang
”
”
James Patterson (Fang (Maximum Ride, #6))
“
Make a list of all the varieties of aliens you can come up with. (And if it's less than 3,000, then THE PEARS ARE LAUGHING AT YOU, MY FRIEND.)" -Scott Westerfeld from NaNoWriMo Pep Talk.
”
”
Scott Westerfeld
“
Block has a list of questions that she aims to cover with sick patients in the time before decisions have to be made: What do they understand their prognosis to be, what are their concerns about what lies ahead, what kinds of trade-offs are they willing to make, how do they want to spend their time if their health worsens, who do they want to make decisions if they can’t? A decade
”
”
Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End)
“
Someone once asked Michelangelo how he was able to create the amazing statue of David. He replied, “I didn’t create David. He was there all along, in that massive block of marble. I just had to chip away to find him.
”
”
Lori Nelson Spielman (The Life List)
“
Overcoming fragmentation can be a very significant strategic opportunity. The payoff to consolidating a fragmented industry can be high because the costs of entry into it are by definition low, and there tend to be small and relatively weak competitors who offer little threat of retaliation. I have stressed earlier in this book that an industry must be viewed as an interrelated system, and this fact applies to fragmented industries as well. An industry can be fragmented because of only one of the factors listed in the previous section. If this fundamental block to consolidation can be somehow overcome, this often triggers a process by which the entire structure of the industry changes.
”
”
Michael E. Porter (Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors)
“
Whoever had designed the block of flats had obviously worked to a clear set of priorities. Unfortunately, while cost, size, and low-maintenance had made it to the top of the list, aesthetics, good escape routes, and shelter from gunfire hadn’t.
”
”
Benedict Jacka (Taken (Alex Verus, #3))
“
here’s my 8-step process for maximizing efficacy (doing the right things): Wake up at least 1 hour before you have to be at a computer screen. Email is the mind-killer. Make a cup of tea (I like pu-erh) and sit down with a pen/pencil and paper. Write down the 3 to 5 things—and no more—that are making you the most anxious or uncomfortable. They’re often things that have been punted from one day’s to-do list to the next, to the next, to the next, and so on. Most important usually equals most uncomfortable, with some chance of rejection or conflict. For each item, ask yourself: “If this were the only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day?” “Will moving this forward make all the other to-dos unimportant or easier to knock off later?” Put another way: “What, if done, will make all of the rest easier or irrelevant?” Look only at the items you’ve answered “yes” to for at least one of these questions. Block out at 2 to 3 hours to focus on ONE of them for today. Let the rest of the urgent but less important stuff slide. It will still be there tomorrow. TO BE CLEAR: Block out at 2 to 3 HOURS to focus on ONE of them for today. This is ONE BLOCK OF TIME. Cobbling together 10 minutes here and there to add up to 120 minutes does not work. No phone calls or social media allowed. If you get distracted or start procrastinating, don’t freak out and downward-spiral; just gently come back to your ONE to-do.
”
”
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
“
I thought I'd go home and reread Sue Grafton. It's been a while since I last read the one about the topless dancer who gets poison injected into one of her implants."
"'D' Is For Cup."
"Right. Bern, you know what I wish? I wish she didn't have to stop at twenty-six. When the alphabet's used up, what happens to Kinsey?"
"Are you kidding? She goes straight into doublé letters. 'AA' Is For drunks, 'BB' Is For Gun, 'CC' Is For Rider. There was a whole list in Publishers Weekly a few months back. 'PP' Is For Golden Showers, 'ZZ' Is For Topp- I can't remember them all, but it looks as though she can go on forever."
"Bern, that's wonderful news."
"You'll be reading about Kinsey fifty years from now," I told her. "'AAA' Is for Motorists, 'MMM' Is for Scotch Tape. You'll never have to stop.
”
”
Lawrence Block (The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams (Bernie Rhodenbarr, #6))
“
What's coming out of the stereo is like a genre unto itself, a charming, fucked-up fairy tale that immediately breaks my heart in all the best ways.
I stretch out on the floor with my ear parked next to the speaker, in a trance. I place the album cover over my face to block out any interruption as "I'll Be Your Mirror" seduces me. I immediately add the song to my mental list of top ten songs ever.
And as I'm bobbing my head with dreamy abandon, I hear a voice. "Nice choice, DJ," it says.
I slowly slide the album cover down past my eyes and look up. My eyes spy his shoes first--paint-splattered brogues. My heart stops when I look at his face. Pale skin, messy black hair, emerald eyes...Senor Smolder! He's eighteen, maybe nineteen. And no, my imagination didn't lie, he is just as devastating now as he was the first time I saw him. Only even more, because he just complimented my taste in music.
”
”
Shauna Cross (Derby Girl)
“
I tell him getting stuck is the commonest trouble of all. Usually, I say, your mind gets stuck when you're trying to do too many things at once. What you have to do is try not to force words to com. That just gets you more stuck. What you have to do now is separate out the things and do them one at a time. You're trying to think of what to say and what to say first at the same time and that's too hard. So separate them out. Just make a list of all the things you want to say in any old order. Then later we'll figure out the right order.
”
”
Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (Phaedrus, #1))
“
My daughter was sixteen,” she went on. Tears ran over the bridge of her nose and onto the block, but her voice remained strong and loud. “Sixteen, when you burned her. Her name was Kaleen, and she had eyes like thunderclouds. I still hear her voice in my dreams.” The king jerked his chin to the executioner, who stepped forward. “My sister was thirty-six. Her name was Liessa, and she had two boys who were her joy.” The executioner raised his ax. “My neighbor and his wife were seventy. Their names were Jon and Estrel. They were killed because they dared try to protect my daughter when your men came for her.” Rena Goldsmith was still reciting her list of the dead when the ax fell.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (Crown of Midnight (Throne of Glass, #2))
“
PS. Please don't block me from your email contact list. The
”
”
Helena Hunting (Pucked (Pucked, #1))
“
I thrust Sophie into a corner, blocking her with my body. She panted and snagged her lower lip in her teeth. “This is not my life,” she insisted.
I looked at her solemnly. “I’m afraid it is. But it doesn’t have to be for long. Let’s just get through this. Then things go back to normal for you.”
“Like they keep going back to normal for you?” Sophie hissed. “Ghost of your mother, psycho ex-best friend, company agent dating your dad, psychic vampire ex-boyfriend, werewolf current boyfriend—by the way, I can’t blame you for that one,” she confessed, eyes round as she mouthed the word whoa before continuing with her list, “Trip to the asylum, attempts against your life, vigilante father…”
“Hey, the last ones are brand new. And the vigilante father thing? He’ll revert.”
“Anyhow, I’m not so keen on your concept of normal.” I caught her staring at me.
”
”
Shannon Delany (Bargains and Betrayals (13 to Life, #3))
“
Organize your life, get a calendar, and make lists. Block out time for relaxation, for fun, for productivity. There are always spaces in time that you can work on yourself. I have my days scheduled down to the minute.
”
”
Phylecia Kellar (Be Happy or Get the F* Out: A Bipolar Success Story — and Your Guide to Hope, Recovery, and Designing a Life You Love)
“
There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn’t. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don’t know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it. My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.
”
”
Marilynne Robinson (Gilead)
“
friendship nostalgia
i miss the days when
my friends knew every mundane detail
about my life and i knew every ordinary detail about theirs
adulthood has starved me of that consistency that us
those walks around the block
those long conversations when we were
too lost in the moment to care
what time it was when we won-and celebrated
when we failed and celebrated even harder
when we were just kids
now we have our very important jobs
that fill up our very busy schedules
we have to compare calendars
just to plan coffee dates
that one of us will eventually cancel
because adulthood is being
too exhausted to leave our apartments most days
i miss belonging to a group of people bigger than myself
it was that belonging that made life easier to live
how come no one warned us about
how we'd graduate and grow apart
after everything we'd been through
how come no one said
one of life's biggest challenges
would be trying to stay connected
to the people that make us feel alive
no one talks about the hole
a friend can leave inside you
when they go off to make their dreams come true
in college we used to stay up till 4 in the morning
dreaming of what we'd do
the moment we started earning real paychecks
now we finally have the money
to cross everything off our bucket lists
but those lists are collecting dust
in some lost corridor of our minds
sometimes when i get lonely
i still search for them
i'd give anything to go back
and do the foolish things we used to do
i feel the most present in your presence
when we're laughing so hard
the past slides off our shoulders
and worries of the future slip away
the truth is i couldn't survive without my friends
they know exactly what i need
before i even know that i need
the way we hold each other is just different
so forget grabbing coffee
i don't want to have another dinner
where we sit across from each other
at a table reminiscing about old times
when we have so much time left
to make new memories with
how about
you go pack your bags
and i'll pack mine
you take a week off work
i'll grab my keys
and let's go for ride
we've got years of catching up to do
”
”
Rupi Kaur
“
That mention of Feuerbach and joy reminded me of something I saw early one morning a few years ago, as I was walking up to the church. There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn’t. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don’t know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it. My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it. In
”
”
Marilynne Robinson (Gilead)
“
withdrew His right hand that [once] blocked (הֵשִׁ֥יב אָחֹ֛ור יְמִינֹ֖ו) literally; “has-drawn back His-right-hand”.
The last Hebrew word, listed above, invokes one of the tribes of Judah: Benjamin (#H1144 nymynb), which literally means: son of my right hand.
David’s right hand was strengthened by his mighty men from the tribe of Benjamin: Ahiezer, Joash, Jeziel, Pelet, Beracah, Jehu, Ishmaiah, Jeremiah, Jahaziel, Johanan, Jozabad, Eluzai, Jerimoth, Bealiah, Shemariah, Shephatiah, Elkanah, Isshiah, Azarel, Joezer, Jashobeam, Joelah, and Zebadiah. (1Ch 12:1-7)
pg 42
”
”
Michael Ben Zehabe (Lamentations: how narcissistic leaders torment church and family (The Hidden Series))
“
Years later, a different therapist asked her exactly what she was afraid of. Varya was initially stumped, not because she didn’t know what she was afraid of but because it was harder to think of what she wasn’t.
“So give me some examples,” said the therapist, and that night Varya made a list.
Cancer. Climate change. Being the victim of a car crash. Being the cause of a car crash. (There was a period when the thought of killing a bicyclist while making a right turn caused Vaya to follow any bicyclist for blocks, checking again and again to make sure she hadn’t.) Gunmen, Plane crashes – sudden doom! People wearing Band-Aids. AIDS ¬¬- really, all types of viruses and bacteria and disease. Infecting someone else. Dirty surfaces, soiled linens, bodily secretions. Drugstores and pharmacies. Ticks and bedbugs and lice. Chemicals. The homeless. Crowds. Uncertainty and risk and open-ended endings. Responsibility and guilt. She is even afraid of her own mind. She is afraid of its power, of what it does to her.
”
”
Chloe Benjamin (The Immortalists)
“
I'm afraid that just as wealth and privilege can be a stumbling block on the path to the gospel, theological expertise and piety can also get in the way of the kingdom. Like wealth, these are not inherently bad things. However, they are easily idolized. The longer our lists of rules and regulations, the more likely it is that God himself will break one.
”
”
Rachel Held Evans (Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions)
“
The weavers I’ve met are extremely relational. They are driven to seek deep relations with others, both to feed their hunger for connection and because they believe that change happens through deepening relationships. When they are working with the homeless or the poor or the traumatized, they are laboring alongside big welfare systems that offer services but not care. These systems treat people as “cases” or “clients.” They are necessary to give people financial stability and support, but they can’t do transformational change. As Peter Block, one of the leading experts on community, puts it, “Talk to any poor person or vulnerable person and they can give you a long list of the services they have received. They are well serviced, but you often have to ask what in their life has fundamentally changed.
”
”
David Brooks (The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life)
“
Besides, even if I blocked my thoughts, my eyes would give me away. It was easy to put on a brave face but the eyes were essentially the window to the soul.
Your eyes would always betray you; no wonder people avoided eye contact when they had something to hide. The eyes couldn’t fake emotions – surprise, happiness, betrayal, remorse. The list went on and on. Mine were probably screaming anticipation with a hint of irritation.
”
”
Shawnda Currie (Broken - Afflictions of the Evolved (The Evolved Trilogy, #2))
“
Sophie stopped the taxi at an imposing gate that blocked the bank’s driveway—a cement-lined ramp that descended beneath the building. A video camera overhead was aimed directly at them, and Langdon had the feeling that this camera, unlike those at the Louvre, was authentic. Sophie rolled down the window and surveyed the electronic podium on the driver’s side. An LCD screen provided directions in seven languages. Topping the list was English.
”
”
Dan Brown (The da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2))
“
Every writing session after this realization, I dedicated five minutes (sometimes more, never less) and wrote out a quick description of what I was going to write that day. Sometimes it wasn't even a paragraph, just a list of this happens, then that, then that. This one simple change—those five stupid minutes—boosted my word count more than any other single thing I’ve ever done. I went from writing 2k a day to 5k a day within a week without increasing my 6-hour writing block. Some days, I even finished early.
”
”
Rachel Aaron (2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love)
“
Lying awake, listening to the nocturnal sounds of machines and murmurings, I composed my list of physical desires: to feel the ground under my feet, to have the muscles in my legs flex, to feel the weight of the rest of my body, to put one foot in front of the other. I tried to block out the fact that I still couldn’t even place my feet on the floor, that they would not do the things I wanted them to. They just fell down, like two tiny sandbags tumbling out of a wheelbarrow. It was as if they had lost all connection to me.
”
”
Rikke Schmidt Kjærgaard (The Blink of an Eye: A Memoir of Dying - and Learning How to Live Again: A Memoir of Dying―and Learning How to Live Again)
“
Africa’s coastline? great beaches, really, really lovely beaches, but terrible natural harbours. Rivers? Amazing rivers, but most of them are rubbish for actually transporting anything, given that every few miles you go over a waterfall. These are just two in a long list of problems which help explain why Africa isn’t technologically or politically as successful as Western Europe or North America.
There are lots of places that are unsuccessful, but few have been as unsuccessful as Africa, and that despite having a head start as the place where Homo sapiens originated about 200,000 years ago. As that most lucid of writers, Jared Diamond, put it in a brilliant National Geographic article in 2005, ‘It’s the opposite of what one would expect from the runner first off the block.’ However, the first runners became separated from everyone else by the Sahara Desert and the Indian and Atlantic oceans. Almost the entire continent developed in isolation from the Eurasian land mass, where ideas and technology were exchanged from east to west, and west to east, but not north to south.
”
”
Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics (Politics of Place, #1))
“
Truman repeatedly stressed the unique nature of the American presidency. He called it the greatest office ever created by the mind of man. In the Truman Presidential Library, only a few blocks from his house, he had ordered an inscription to be prominently displayed, listing the six tasks of the president. He was commander-in-chief of the armed forces, leader of his political party, initiator of legislation, maker of foreign policy, the head of state and the chief executive, responsible for seeing that the laws passed by Congress were respected and obeyed.
”
”
Thomas Fleming (Storms Over the Presidency (The Thomas Fleming Library))
“
The bag circles the table several times. Each time Maya passes it to her neighbor, saying nothing. Finally the discussion is done. Maya looks troubled. She’s embarrassed, I’m guessing, that she hasn’t participated. Samantha reads from her notebook a list of enforcement mechanisms that the group has brainstormed. “Rule Number 1,” she says. “If you break the laws, you miss recess.…” “Wait!” interrupts Maya. “I have an idea!” “Go ahead,” says Samantha, a little impatiently. But Maya, who like many sensitive introverts seems attuned to the subtlest cues for disapproval, notices the sharpness in Samantha’s voice. She opens her mouth to speak, but lowers her eyes, only managing something rambling and unintelligible. No one can hear her. No one tries. The cool girl in the group—light-years ahead of the rest in her slinkiness and fashion-forward clothes—sighs dramatically. Maya peters off in confusion, and the cool girl says, “OK, Samantha, you can keep reading the rules now.” [...] Maya, for her part, sits curled up at the periphery of the group, writing her name over and over again in her notebook, in big block letters, as if to reassert her identity. At least to herself.
”
”
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
“
It’s up to you to find ways to eviscerate your bullshit. How much time do you spend at the dinner table talking about nothing after the meal is done? How many calls and texts do you send for no reason at all? Look at your whole life, list your obligations and tasks. Put a time stamp on them. How many hours are required to shop, eat, and clean? How much sleep do you need? What’s your commute like? Can you make it there under your own power? Block everything into windows of time, and once your day is scheduled out, you’ll know how much flexibility you have to exercise on a given day and how to maximize it.
”
”
David Goggins (Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds)
“
When Harper was in among the stones she could see brass plaques screwed into the towering pillars of granite. One listed the names of seventeen boys who had died in the mud of eastern France during the First World War. Another listed the names of thirty-four boys who had died on the beaches of western France during the Second. Harper thought all tombstones should be this size, that the small blocks to be found in most graveyards did not even begin to express the sickening enormity of losing a virgin son, thousands of miles away, in the muck and cold. You needed something so big you felt it might topple over and crush you.
”
”
Joe Hill (The Fireman)
“
over the bridge of her nose and onto the block, but her voice remained strong and loud. “Sixteen, when you burned her. Her name was Kaleen, and she had eyes like thunderclouds. I still hear her voice in my dreams.” The king jerked his chin to the executioner, who stepped forward. “My sister was thirty-six. Her name was Liessa, and she had two boys who were her joy.” The executioner raised his ax. “My neighbor and his wife were seventy. Their names were Jon and Estrel. They were killed because they dared try to protect my daughter when your men came for her.” Rena Goldsmith was still reciting her list of the dead when the ax fell.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (Crown of Midnight (Throne of Glass, #2))
“
all-too-familiar homes. There were at least a dozen people waiting at the meat counter, and the dairy case had already been emptied of the pound blocks of butter Grandma liked to use for baking. I tried not to get annoyed and made substitutions whenever I came across an item on my list that had sold out. It actually seemed appropriate somehow to have such a hodgepodge holiday. I had to settle for chicken instead of the traditional Cornish game hens that Grandma prepared for our Christmas feast. Low-fat eggnog because the regular cartons were already gone. Margarine substituted for butter. At the checkout, I counted the cash that Grandma
”
”
Nicole Baart (After the Leaves Fall)
“
they rounded us all up for interrogation. They wanted names and crimes and we gave them both in droves. One guy I knew just listed off everyone who worked on his old block. A week later the incursion force went and rounded up a bunch of accountants and butchers and grocery store clerks. Eventually, it got to be that the Blues had so much unreliable information on their hands, they had to let all those people go. But it was like a snake eating its own tail—by the time they got around to emptying those detention camps, they’d already turned most of the people there into exactly what they’d needed them to be in the first place. I always said the camps at Sugarloaf were the best recruiters the
”
”
Omar El Akkad (American War)
“
One of the gunmen in the room, ending his call to his wife, and seeing me typing, came across and shook my hand. “You going to make a lot of money off this story!” the gunman with the Rastafarian hairstyle said. His pump-action shotgun was slung in the crook of his arm. He was smiling. “Yeah”, I said. “If I get out of here alive.” “You all right, you going to be all right”, he said, laughing. But you see me? I don’t know too much about my future right now.” “Everybody’s going to be all right,” I said. He laughed again. And reached into his back pocket and came out with a little white slip of paper in his hand. “I don’t know about me,” he said, smiling. “But if you write the story and make a lot of money, maybe you could get these things for the wife for me.” He handed me the slip of paper. On it, in block letters, was an itemized list: TV SET VIDEO SET WASHING MACHINE FRIDGE For a moment I shook my head in bewilderment, looking at that list. But he was laughing again and saying: “So if you make a lot of money off your book, get those things for the wife for me, nuh.” I said: “Sure.” I pocketed the note and walked away, flooded by nausea, thinking: so this is what he’s in it for, this young Trinidadian with the Rasta hairdo, the fake army camouflage shirt and pants tucked into his big soldier-looking black boots, with the wicked-looking shotgun crooked in his arm. A free television set. A video set. A washing machine. A fridge.
”
”
Raoul Pantin (Days of Wrath: The 1990 Coup in Trinidad and Tobago)
“
My best friend, Keri Downey, lived a block away. Her house was a much livelier version of mine. Keri and I met the first day of kindergarten. I was dressed in a cowgirl outfit, which says more about my mother’s wonderful acceptance of my weirdness and less about my fashion choices at that time. Remember, this was still the 1970s, a time when my teachers wore leotards and corduroys and kissed their boyfriends in front of us. My mother was at home, but Keri’s mom, Ginny, worked. Keri was a typical latchkey kid, and her house had that exciting Lord of the Flies feeling of being run by children. Keri had a list of chores and suffered consequences if she didn’t do them. I came from a home where my mother would gently suggest that maybe I could pick up my room if I had the chance.
”
”
Amy Poehler (Yes Please)
“
So what are you after, eh? Side of beef? Some chops?'
'Aye, sir. Whatever you fancy.'
He licked his lips and listed his favorite dishes: plain pudding, lemon pickle, roast beef. Then he asked for his own particulars: tobacco and coltsfoot for his pipe, and some more comfrey for Her Ladyship's tea.
'And no green oils. Get a block of dripping and cook it plain.'
It was true that the food in France had been a great hog potch of good and bad. One night on the road we were served a right mess of giblets, fishy smelling frogs' legs and moldy old cheese. But at Chantilly the fricassee of veal was so tender I'm not sure how they softened it. I could have eaten the whole pot it was that good, but instead had to watch Jesmire scraping off the sauce, whining all the time for a little boiled ham.
”
”
Martine Bailey (An Appetite for Violets)
“
We're all so happy you're feeling better, Miss McIntosh. Looks like you still have a good bump on your noggin, though," she says in her childlike voice.
Since there is no bump on my noggin, I take a little offense but decide to drop it. "Thanks, Mrs. Poindexter. It looks worse than it feels. Just a little tender."
"Yeah, I'd say the door got the worst of it," he says beside me. Galen signs himself in on the unexcused tardy sheet below my name. When his arm brushes against mine, it feels like my blood's turned into boiling water.
I turn to face him. My dreams really do not do him justice. Long black lashes, flawless olive skin, cut jaw like an Italian model, lips like-for the love of God, have some dignity, nitwit. He just made fun of you. I cross my arms and lift my chin. "You would know," I say.
He grins, yanks my backpack from me, and walks out. Trying to ignore the waft of his scent as the door shuts, I look to Mrs. Poindexter, who giggles, shrugs, and pretends to sort some papers. The message is clear: He's your problem, but what a great problem to have. Has he charmed he sense out of the staff here, too? If he started stealing kids' lunch money, would they also giggle at that? I growl through clenched teeth and stomp out of the office.
Galen is waiting for me right outside the door, and I almost barrel into him. He chuckles and catches my arm. "This is becoming a habit for you, I think."
After I'm steady-after Galen steadies me, that is-I poke my finger into his chest and back him against the wall, which only makes him grin wider. "You...are...irritating...me," I tell him.
"I noticed. I'll work on it."
"You can start by giving me my backpack."
"Nope."
"Nope?"
"Right-nope. I'm carrying it for you. It's the least I can do."
"Well, can't argue with that, can I?" I reach around for it, but he moves to block me. "Galen, I don't want you to carry it. Now knock it off. I'm late for class."
"I'm late for it too, remember?"
Oh, that's right. I've let him distract me from my agenda. "Actually, I need to go back to the office."
"No problem. I'll wait for you here, then I'll walk you to class."
I pinch the bridge of my nose. "That's the thing. I'm changing my schedule. I won't be in your class anymore, so you really should just go. You're seriously violating Rule Numero Uno."
He crosses his arms. "Why are you changing your schedule? Is it because of me?"
"No."
"Liar."
"Sort of."
"Emma-"
"Look, I don't want you to take this personally. It's just that...well, something bad happens every time I'm around you."
He raises a brow. "Are you sure it's me? I mean, from where I stood, it looked like your flip-flops-"
"What were we arguing about anyway? We were arguing, right?"
"You...you don't remember?"
I shake my head. "Dr. Morton said I might have some short-term memory loss. I do remember being mad at you, though."
He looks at me like I'm a criminal. "You're saying you don't remember anything I said. Anything you said."
The way I cross my arms reminds me of my mother. "That's what I'm saying, yes."
"You swear?"
"If you're not going to tell me, then give me my backpack. I have a concussion, not broken arms. I'm not helpless."
His smile could land him a cover shoot for any magazine in the country. "We were arguing about which beach you wanted me to take you to. We were going swimming after school."
"Liar." With a capital L. Swimming-drowning-falls on my to-do list somewhere below giving birth to porcupines.
"Oh, wait. You're right. We were arguing about when the Titanic actually sank. We had already agreed to go to my house to swim.
”
”
Anna Banks (Of Poseidon (The Syrena Legacy, #1))
“
A Safety Travel with Sinclair James International
Traveling to somewhere completely foreign to you may be challenging but that is what travelers always look for. It can be a good opportunity to find something new and discover new places, meet new people and try a different culture. However, it can involve a lot of risk as well. You may be surprised to find yourself naked and penniless on the side of the road trying to figure out what you did wrong. These kinds of situations come rarely when you are careful and cautious enough but it is not impossible.
Sinclair James International Travel and Tours, your Australian based traveling guide can help you travel safely through the following tips:
1. Pack all Security Items
In case of emergencies, you should have all the safety tools and security items with you. Carry a card with your name and number with you and don’t forget to scribble down the numbers of local police station, fire department, list of hospitals and other necessary numbers that you may need. Place them in each compartment and on your pockets. If ever you find yourself being a victim of pick pocketing in Manila, Philippines or being driven around in circles in the streets of Bangkok, Thailand, you will definitely find these numbers very helpful. It is also advisable to put your name and an emergency number in case you are in trouble and may need someone else to call.
2. Protect your Passport
Passports nowadays have RFID which can be scanned from a distance. We have heard some complaints from fellow travelers of being victims of scams which involves stealing of information through passports. An RFID blocking case in a wallet may come in handy to prevent hackers from stealing your information.
3. Beware of Taxis
When you exit the airport, taxis may all look the same but some of them can be hiding a defective scam to rob tourists during their drive. It is better to ask an official before taking a taxi as many unmarked ones claim that they are legitimate. Also, if the fare isn’t flat rate, be sure you know the possible routes. Some drivers will know better and will take good care of you, but others will take longer routes to increase the fare. If you know your options, you can suggest a different route to avoid paying too much.
4. Be aware of your Rights
Laws change from state to state, and certainly from country to country, but ignorance to them will get you nowhere. In fact, in many cases you can get yourself out of trouble by knowing the laws that will affect you. When traveling to other countries, make sure to review the laws and policies that can affect your activities. There are a lot of misconceptions and knowing these could save you a headache. Sinclair James International
”
”
James Sinclair
“
Values come from the heart and are immutable at the moment. Yes, they may change tomorrow, a month from now, or a year from now. But at this moment, your signature values are something you feel so strongly about; they can’t be changed or compromised. In fact, they determine how happy you are at any moment in your life. And the word signature means that you have a hierarchy (a prioritized list) of values that are yours and yours alone. The only way you can find joy in life and in your career is to know what your signature values are and then to work hard living harmoniously with them. For instance, if you value health and are not healthy physically or emotionally, you can’t be happy. If you value financial independence and are broke, you can’t be happy. If you value a loving relationship and you are in a toxic and unhealthy one, you can’t be happy. If you value peace of mind but experience constant stress, you can’t be happy.
”
”
Jay A. Block (101 Best Ways to Land a Job in Troubled Times)
“
So let’s imagine for now that our love for our children and our thankfulness for their existence is a given. Let’s imagine that no one can possibly doubt the depths of our feelings for our sons and daughters. Let’s imagine that everyone in the world knows exactly how much we love all the many things there are to love about our children and the relationships we have with them. Let’s imagine that we are all most definitely Good Moms, and, with all that on our side, admit for a moment what we don’t love. I’ll give you my list, you add your own. I don’t love every minute of going to the playground. I don’t love every minute of going to the museums. I don’t love every minute of watching Elmo. I don’t love every minute of having to wake up early in the morning. I don’t love every minute of having interrupted sleep at night. I don’t love every minute of having to be the one to make the rules and the one who must enforce them. I don’t love every minute of laundry. I don’t love every minute of changing diapers. I don’t love every minute of having to endure the stares of people when my child freaks out in public. I don’t love every minute of making food that my kid ends up throwing on the floor. I don’t love every minute that I have the Barney song stuck in my head. I don’t love every minute of having to reason with a tantrum-throwing toddler. I don’t love every minute of being peed on, pooped on, and thrown-up on. I don’t love every minute of weaning. I don’t love every minute of sidewalk chalk. I don’t love every minute of having to pick up the blocks fifteen times a day. I don’t love every minute of putting my life on hold. I don’t love every minute of tantrums. I don’t love every minute of going to story time at the library. I HATE the Teletubbies. I don’t love every minute of being chained to someone else’s routine. I don’t love every minute of not being able to go to the bathroom without company. I don’t love every minute of being a mother.
”
”
Andrea J. Buchanan (Mother Shock: Tales from the First Year and Beyond -- Loving Every (Other) Minute of It)
“
[I was reminded] of something I saw early one morning a few years ago, as I was walking up to the church. There was a young couple strolling along half a block a head of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted but she wasn't. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don't know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables and doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it. My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.
”
”
Marilynne Robinson (Gilead (Gilead, #1))
“
If you look at any list of the red flags for domestic violence you will find this jail’s operating manual. Embarrassing or putting you down; looking at you or acting in ways that scare you; controlling who you see, where you go, or what you do; keeping you or discouraging you from seeing your friends or families; taking your money or refusing to give you money for expenses; preventing you from making your own decisions; telling you that you are a bad parent or threatening to harm or take away your children; preventing you from working or attending school; blaming you for the abuse, or acting like it’s not really happening; destroying your property or threatening to hurt you; intimidating you with guns, knives, or other weapons; pressuring you to have sex when you don’t want to or do things sexually you’re not comfortable with. Check. Check. And check. The result is a unit full of traumatized and triggered women. And the guards have no idea just how similar they are to the men that, one way or another, landed these women in G block.
”
”
Lara Love Hardin (The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing)
“
Steven’s words slush together as he gets to his feet. “Crossing this one off the bucket list.” Then he
unbuckles his belt and grabs the waist of his pants—yanking the suckers down to his ankles—tighty
whities and all.
Every guy in the car holds up his hands to try to block the spectacle. We groan and complain. “My
eyes! They burn!”
“Put the boa constrictor back in his cage, man.”
“This is not the ass I planned on seeing tonight.”
Our protests fall on deaf ears. Steven is a man on a mission. Wordlessly, he squats and shoves his lilywhite
ass out the window—mooning the gaggle of grannies in the car next to us.
I bet you thought this kind of stuff only happened in movies.
He grins while his ass blows in the wind for a good ninety seconds, ensuring optimal viewage. Then
he pulls his slacks up, turns around, and leans out the window, laughing. “Enjoying the full moon, ladies?”
Wow. Steven usually isn’t the type to visually assault the elderly.
Without warning, his crazy cackling is cut off. He’s silent for a beat, then I hear him choke out a single
strangled word.
“Grandma?”
Then he’s diving back into the limo, his face grayish, dazed, and totally sober. He stares at the floor.
“No way that just happened.”
Matthew and I look at each other hopefully, then we scramble to the window. Sure enough, in the
driver’s seat of that big old Town Car is none other than Loretta P. Reinhart. Mom to George; Grandma to
Steven.
What are the fucking odds, huh?
Loretta was always a cranky old bitch. No sense of humor. Even when I was a kid she hated me.
Thought I was a bad influence on her precious grandchild.
Don’t know where she got that idea from.
She moved out to Arizona years ago. Like a lot of women her age, she still enjoys a good tug on the
slot machine—hence her frequent trips to Sin City. Apparently this is one such trip.
Matthew and I wave and smile and in fourth-grader-like, singsong harmony call out, “Hi, Mrs.
Reinhart.”
She shakes one wrinkled fist in our direction. Then her poofy-haired companion in the backseat flips
us the bird. I’m pretty sure it’s the funniest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen.
The two of us collapse back into our seats, laughing hysterically.
”
”
Emma Chase (Tied (Tangled, #4))
“
I suggest you stand slowly and walk out with my men,” Zrakovi said, tapping a napkin against his lying, two-faced mouth and putting a twenty on the table to cover the drinks. “If you make a scene, innocent humans will be injured. I have a Blue Congress cleanup team in place, however, so if you want to fight in public and damage a few humans, knock yourself out. It will only add to your list of crimes.”
I stood slowly, gritting my teeth when Squirrel Chin patted me down while feeling me up and making it look like a romantic moment. He’d been so busy feeling the naughty bits that he missed both Charlie, sitting in my bag next to my foot, and the dagger attached to my inner forearm.
Idiot. Alex would never have been so sloppy. If Alex had patted me down, he’d have found not only the weapons but also the portable magic kit.
From the corner of my eye, I saw a tourist taking mobile phone shots of us. He’d no doubt email them to all his friends back home with stories of those crazy New Orleanians and their public displays of affection.
I considered pretending to faint, but I was too badly outnumbered for it to work. Like my friend Jean
Lafitte, whose help I could use about now, I didn’t want to try something unless it had a reasonable chance at succeeding. I also didn’t want to pull Charlie out and risk humans getting hurt.
“Walk out the door onto Chartres and turn straight toward the cathedral.” Zrakovi pulled his jacket aside enough for me to see a shoulder holster. I hadn’t even known the man could hold a gun, although for all I knew about guns it could be a water pistol.
The walk to the cathedral transport was three very long city blocks. My best escape opportunity would be near Jackson Square. When the muscular goons tried to turn me left toward the cathedral, I’d try to break and run right toward the river, where I could get lost among the wharves and docks long enough to draw and power a transport. Of course in order to run, I’d have to get away from the clinch of Dreadlocks and Squirrel Chin. Charlie could take care of that.
I slipped the messenger bag over my head slowly, and not even Zrakovi noticed the stick of wood protruding from the top by a couple of inches.
Not to be redundant, but . . . idiots.
None of us spoke as we proceeded down Chartres Street, where, to our south, the clouds continued to build. The wind had grown stronger and drier. The hurricane was sucking all the humidity out of the air, all the better to gain intensity. I hoped Zrakovi, a Bostonian, would enjoy his first storm. I hoped a live oak landed on his head.
”
”
Suzanne Johnson (Belle Chasse (Sentinels of New Orleans #5))
“
The clearest signs of Hakodate's current greatness, though, can be found clustered around its central train station, in the morning market, where blocks and blocks of pristine seafood explode onto the sidewalks like an edible aquarium, showcasing the might of the Japanese fishing industry.
Hokkaido is ground zero for the world's high-end sushi culture. The cold waters off the island have long been home to Japan's A-list of seafood: hairy crab, salmon, scallops, squid, and, of course, uni. The word "Hokkaido" attached to any of these creatures commands a premium at market, one that the finest sushi chefs around the world are all too happy to pay.
Most of the Hokkaido haul is shipped off to the Tsukiji market in Tokyo, where it's auctioned and scattered piece by piece around Japan and the big cities of the world. But the island keeps a small portion of the good stuff for itself, most of which seems to be concentrated in a two-hundred-meter stretch in Hakodate.
Everything here glistens with that sparkly sea essence, and nearly everything is meant to be consumed in the moment. Live sea urchins, piled high in hillocks of purple spikes, are split with scissors and scraped out raw with chopsticks. Scallops are blowtorched in their shells until their edges char and their sweet liquor concentrates. Somewhere, surely, a young fishmonger will spoon salmon roe directly into your mouth for the right price.
”
”
Matt Goulding (Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture)
“
(Readings)
My tower and clan think she and they are so clever… the tower she knew this and she used it meaning she knew what to look up. That is why it is so important to understand the signs and cards. Those that know can figure out what is going to happen in life or the beings around. If you follow the signs and cards, the stars can predict how things are going to turn out. I referred to this person as the tower mainly because they build and block, they cannot be stopped, this is only one solution that I know of… however you cannot blossom with any relationships or dating, and being social is over before it starts with any society around. Still, they are constantly watching over me.
Just like I said they have eyes in the sky meaning, if they are not the ones following behind me, they make sure that they have someone that will. Their followers always report back to the main headquarters, they have to get the information to her so she can twist it and make everybody believe her lies. Some of the lies in which the tower has created for me include. Being gay, I am far from it… Engaging in activities with children, which is completely disgusting. Lewd acts, the list goes on and on.
‘Oh, the internet is a powerful tool; it was created for good, however, some use it for their evil.’ I had to pay with my time, for what I did not do, when is it going to end? I need to stop looking at ‘Blabber Book!
”
”
Marcel Ray Duriez (Nevaeh The Forbidden Touches)
“
[E]ven on the issues that are put up to democratic vote, we are saddled with a two-party system in which the liberal democratic party might be one of the most criminal orginizations in modern history. If you think I am exaggerating, consider that it's the democrats who: Fought the civil war on the side of slavery, created Jim Crow segregation after they lost that war, dropped the only nuclear weapons on a civilian population in history, stole a third of Mexico's land, and forced the Cherokee and other tribes on the infamous Trail of Tears, killed millions in the wars of Korea and South East Asia, doubled the country's prison population under Bill Clinton, deported over 2 million immigrants under Barrack, you get the picture. The point is not that there's anything better about Republicans: Many of whom probably look at the list above and sigh with envy, but that both major US parties are completely devoted to the priorities of the tiny class that runs this country. Each party may be paid to look out for a particular industry, republicans get lots of oil money, while democrats are preferred by the tech industry. But sometimes they propose different strategies to achieve the same ends: such as whether the United States should destroy Middle-Eastern countries with or without the approval of the United Nations. More often, their differences are even less substantial and are almost entirely about how to get a different voting block to support the same policies.
”
”
Danny Katch (Socialism…Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation)
“
Steven’s words slush together as he gets to his feet. “Crossing this one off the bucket list.” Then he
unbuckles his belt and grabs the waist of his pants—yanking the suckers down to his ankles—tighty
whities and all.
Every guy in the car holds up his hands to try to block the spectacle. We groan and complain. “My
eyes! They burn!”
“Put the boa constrictor back in his cage, man.”
“This is not the ass I planned on seeing tonight.”
Our protests fall on deaf ears. Steven is a man on a mission. Wordlessly, he squats and shoves his lilywhite
ass out the window—mooning the gaggle of grannies in the car next to us.
I bet you thought this kind of stuff only happened in movies.
He grins while his ass blows in the wind for a good ninety seconds, ensuring optimal viewage. Then
he pulls his slacks up, turns around, and leans out the window, laughing. “Enjoying the full moon, ladies?”
Wow. Steven usually isn’t the type to visually assault the elderly.
Without warning, his crazy cackling is cut off. He’s silent for a beat, then I hear him choke out a single
strangled word.
“Grandma?”
Then he’s diving back into the limo, his face grayish, dazed, and totally sober. He stares at the floor.
“No way that just happened.”
Matthew and I look at each other hopefully, then we scramble to the window. Sure enough, in the
driver’s seat of that big old Town Car is none other than Loretta P. Reinhart. Mom to George; Grandma to
Steven.
What are the fucking odds, huh?
....
Matthew and I wave and smile and in fourth-grader-like, singsong harmony call out, “Hi, Mrs.
Reinhart.”
She shakes one wrinkled fist in our direction. Then her poofy-haired companion in the backseat flips
us the bird. I’m pretty sure it’s the funniest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen.
The two of us collapse back into our seats, laughing hysterically.
”
”
Emma Chase (Tied (Tangled, #4))
“
James Tour is a leading origin-of-life researcher with over 630 research publications and over 120 patents. He was inducted into the National Academy of Inventors in 2015, listed in “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” by Thomson Reuters in 2014, and named “Scientist of the Year” by R&D Magazine. Here is how he recently described the state of the field: We have no idea how the molecules that compose living systems could have been devised such that they would work in concert to fulfill biology’s functions. We have no idea how the basic set of molecules, carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids and proteins were made and how they could have coupled in proper sequences, and then transformed into the ordered assemblies until there was the construction of a complex biological system, and eventually to that first cell. Nobody has any idea on how this was done when using our commonly understood mechanisms of chemical science. Those that say that they understand are generally wholly uninformed regarding chemical synthesis. Those that say, “Oh this is well worked out,” they know nothing—nothing—about chemical synthesis—nothing. … From a synthetic chemical perspective, neither I nor any of my colleagues can fathom a prebiotic molecular route to construction of a complex system. We cannot even figure out the prebiotic routes to the basic building blocks of life: carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids, and proteins. Chemists are collectively bewildered. Hence I say that no chemist understands prebiotic synthesis of the requisite building blocks, let alone assembly into a complex system. That’s how clueless we are. I have asked all of my colleagues—National Academy members, Nobel Prize winners—I sit with them in offices. Nobody understands this. So if your professors say it’s all worked out, if your teachers say it’s all worked out, they don’t know what they’re talking about.23
”
”
Matti Leisola (Heretic: One Scientist's Journey from Darwin to Design)
“
These questions are closely related to one of the Buddha’s main interests: how to lead a virtuous life. Every spiritual tradition is concerned with virtue, but what does virtue mean? Is it the same as following a list of dos and don’ts? Does a virtuous person have to be a goody-goody? Is it necessary to be dogmatic, rigid, and smug? Or is there room to be playful, spontaneous, and relaxed? Is it possible to enjoy life while at the same time being virtuous? Like many spiritual traditions, the Dharma has lists of positive and negative actions. Buddhists are encouraged to commit to some basic precepts, such as not to kill, steal, or lie. Members of the monastic community, such as myself, have much longer lists of rules to follow. But the Buddha didn’t establish these rules merely for people to conform to outer codes of behavior. The Buddha’s main concern was always to help people become free of suffering. With the understanding that our suffering originates from confusion in our mind, his objective was to help us wake up out of that confused state. He therefore encouraged or discouraged certain forms of behavior based on whether they promoted or hindered that process of awakening. When we ask ourselves, “Does it matter?” we can first look at the outer, more obvious results of our actions. But then we can go deeper by examining how we are affecting our own mind: Am I making an old habit more habitual? Am I strengthening propensities I’d like to weaken? When I’m on the verge of lying to save face, or manipulating a situation to go my way, where will that lead? Am I going in the direction of becoming a more deceitful person or a more guilty, self-denigrating person? How about when I experiment with practicing patience or generosity? How are my actions affecting my process of awakening? Where will they lead? By questioning ourselves in these ways, we start to see “virtue” in a new light. Virtuous behavior is not about doing “good” because we feel we’re “bad” and need to shape up. Instead of guilt or dogma, how we choose to act can be guided by wisdom and kindness. Seen in this light, our question then boils down to “What awakens my heart, and what blocks that process from happening?” In the language of Buddhism, we use the word “karma.” This is a way of talking about the workings of cause and effect, action and reaction.
”
”
Pema Chödrön (Welcoming the Unwelcome: Wholehearted Living in a Brokenhearted World)
“
The successful individual sales producer wins by being as selfish as possible with her time. The more often the salesperson stays away from team members and distractions, puts her phone on Do Not Disturb (DND), closes her door, or chooses to work for a few hours from the local Panera Bread café, the more productive she’ll likely be. In general, top producers in sales tend to exhibit a characteristic I’ve come to describe as being selfishly productive. The seller who best blocks out the rest of the world, who maintains obsessive control of her calendar, who masters focusing solely on her own highest-value revenue-producing activities, who isn’t known for being a “team player,” and who is not interested in playing good corporate citizen or helping everyone around her, is typically a highly effective seller who ends up on top of the sales rankings. Contrary to popular opinion, being selfish is not bad at all. In fact, for an individual contributor salesperson, it is a highly desirable trait and a survival skill, particularly in today’s crazed corporate environment where everyone is looking to put meetings on your calendar and take you away from your primary responsibilities! Now let’s switch gears and look at the sales manager’s role and responsibilities. How well would it work to have a sales manager who kept her office phone on DND and declined almost every incoming call to her mobile phone? Do we want a sales manager who closes her office door, is concerned only about herself, and is for the most part inaccessible? No, of course not. The successful sales manager doesn’t win on her own; she wins through her people by helping them succeed. Think about other key sales management responsibilities: Leading team meetings. Developing talent. Encouraging hearts. Removing obstacles. Coaching others. Challenging data, false assumptions, wrong attitudes, and complacency. Pushing for more. Putting the needs of your team members ahead of your own. Hmmm. Just reading that list again reminds me why it is often so difficult to transition from being a top producer in sales into a sales management role. Aside from the word sales, there is truly almost nothing similar about the positions. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on corporate responsibilities like participating on the executive committee, dealing with human resources compliance issues, expense management, recruiting, and all the other burdens placed on the sales manager. Again,
”
”
Mike Weinberg (Sales Management. Simplified.: The Straight Truth About Getting Exceptional Results from Your Sales Team)
“
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Syn paid the bill and they headed to the door with lust so thick around them, Syn couldn’t help but wonder if anyone else could see it. Furi reached back for Syn’s hand and he gladly offered it. He looked over his shoulder and threw him a seductive wink when Syn crowded in close behind him. As soon as Syn made it out the door, he saw four members of his team walking up the sidewalk. Well fuck me.
“Hey, Sarge.” Pendleton, his demolitions expert was the first to speak up.
Syn threw down Furi’s hand and quickly put some distance between them. “Yeah, hey fellas.” They’d all stopped and were staring back and forth between him and Furi. Syn couldn’t even look Furious in his eye after what he’d just done.
Detective Green cleared his throat and pointed at Furi. “Don’t I know you?”
“Hardly,” Furi mumbled.
“Um, this is ... uh, uh. He’s my ... uh.” Syn cursed under his breath. Obviously his team already knew who Furious was. They all had detailed lists of Illustra’s entertainers and Furious’ image was not easy to forget.
“Sarge, who’s your friend?” Detective Ruxsburg asked, a sly smile playing on his handsome face.
“He’s um.”
“He’s leaving,” Furi’s deep voice cut in as he eased his way through and walked in the opposite direction of Syn’s truck.
“Fuck,” Syn whispered as he watched Furi turn the corner.
“You better go after him and be ready to do some serious groveling,” his IT Detective said in his calm, cool voice.
Syn didn’t say anything. His guys walked around him and went into the bar, leaving him feeling ashamed. He thought about running after Furi but choose to get in his truck and cut him off at the corner. He sped around the block and pulled into an alley hoping to intercept his angry date. When Syn got out of the truck Furi was turning the corner coming toward him. Oh hell. Furi had his hands crammed into his pockets and if the scowl on his face didn’t indicate how angry Furious was, then his choice of words when he finally reached Syn sure as hell did. “Get the fuck away from me.”
“Furious, I know you're upset.”
Furi spun around and glared at him with midnight eyes. “Upset! Upset! Look at my face goddamnit! Does this just look upset to you?”
Syn put his hands up in a calming gesture. “Alright, you’re angry, and you have every right to be. I reacted badly back there. I was just caught off guard.”
Furi was in Syn’s face and people on the street had begun to stop and stare. “Can we please move this off the sidewalk?” Syn tried to usher Furi farther into the alley and away from the nosy fuckers on the street.
“Don’t fuckin’ touch me!”
“I’m not gonna touch you! Damn, calm down. I just want to explain,” Syn argued. It seemed every time he was around Furi he was apologizing for something. “I’m sorry, okay. I should have introduced you properly to my team.”
“How would the–”
“Please, Furious. Let me finish. I should’ve told them your name and introduced you as my friend at a minimum. I’m sorry. I told you I fuckin’ suck at this dating shit, and if you don’t tell me to go fuck myself and give me another–”
“Go fuck yourself,” Furi interrupted. He tried to move around Syn but Syn grabbed him around the wrist and backed him against the side of his truck.
“No! I will not go fuck myself. I would rather fuck you.”
“Well you pretty much shot that chance all to hell,” Furi yelled right back at him.
“Have I?”
“What do you think?
”
”
A.E. Via
“
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw On a cool fall evening in 2008, four students set out to revolutionize an industry. Buried in loans, they had lost and broken eyeglasses and were outraged at how much it cost to replace them. One of them had been wearing the same damaged pair for five years: He was using a paper clip to bind the frames together. Even after his prescription changed twice, he refused to pay for pricey new lenses. Luxottica, the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, controlled more than 80 percent of the eyewear market. To make glasses more affordable, the students would need to topple a giant. Having recently watched Zappos transform footwear by selling shoes online, they wondered if they could do the same with eyewear. When they casually mentioned their idea to friends, time and again they were blasted with scorching criticism. No one would ever buy glasses over the internet, their friends insisted. People had to try them on first. Sure, Zappos had pulled the concept off with shoes, but there was a reason it hadn’t happened with eyewear. “If this were a good idea,” they heard repeatedly, “someone would have done it already.” None of the students had a background in e-commerce and technology, let alone in retail, fashion, or apparel. Despite being told their idea was crazy, they walked away from lucrative job offers to start a company. They would sell eyeglasses that normally cost $500 in a store for $95 online, donating a pair to someone in the developing world with every purchase. The business depended on a functioning website. Without one, it would be impossible for customers to view or buy their products. After scrambling to pull a website together, they finally managed to get it online at 4 A.M. on the day before the launch in February 2010. They called the company Warby Parker, combining the names of two characters created by the novelist Jack Kerouac, who inspired them to break free from the shackles of social pressure and embark on their adventure. They admired his rebellious spirit, infusing it into their culture. And it paid off. The students expected to sell a pair or two of glasses per day. But when GQ called them “the Netflix of eyewear,” they hit their target for the entire first year in less than a month, selling out so fast that they had to put twenty thousand customers on a waiting list. It took them nine months to stock enough inventory to meet the demand. Fast forward to 2015, when Fast Company released a list of the world’s most innovative companies. Warby Parker didn’t just make the list—they came in first. The three previous winners were creative giants Google, Nike, and Apple, all with over fifty thousand employees. Warby Parker’s scrappy startup, a new kid on the block, had a staff of just five hundred. In the span of five years, the four friends built one of the most fashionable brands on the planet and donated over a million pairs of glasses to people in need. The company cleared $100 million in annual revenues and was valued at over $1 billion. Back in 2009, one of the founders pitched the company to me, offering me the chance to invest in Warby Parker. I declined. It was the worst financial decision I’ve ever made, and I needed to understand where I went wrong.
”
”
Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
“
Olive,’ Mum said, stroking my fringe. ‘I need you to listen to me, and I need you to be brave.’
Opening my eyes again, I swallowed nervously. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Your sister didn’t arrive at work today.’
Sukie was a typist for an insurance company in Clerkenwell. She said it was the dullest job ever.
‘Isn’t today Saturday, though?’ I asked.
‘She was due in to do overtime. No one’s seen her since she was with you and Cliff last night. She’s missing.’
‘Missing?’ I didn’t understand.
Mum nodded.
The nurse added rather unhelpfully: ‘We’ve had casualties from all over London. It’s been chaos. All you can do is keep hoping for the best.’
It was obvious what she meant. I glanced at Mum, who always took the opposite view in any argument. But she stayed silent. Her hands, though, were trembling.
‘Missing isn’t the same as dead,’ I pointed out.
Mum grimaced. ‘That’s true, and I’ve spoken to the War Office: Sukie’s name isn’t on their list of dead or injured but-’
‘So she’s alive, then. She must be. I saw her in the street talking to a man,’ I said. ‘When she realised I’d followed her she was really furious about it.’
Mum looked at me, at the nurse, at the bump on my head. ‘Darling, you’re concussed. Don’t get overexcited now.’
‘But you can’t think she’s dead.’ I insisted. ‘There’s no proof, is ther?’
‘Sometimes it’s difficult to identify someone after…’ Mum faltered.
I knew what she couldn’t say: sometimes if a body got blown apart there’d be nothing left to tie a name tag to. It was why we’d never buried Dad. Perhaps if there’d been a coffin and a headstone and a vicar saying nice things, it would’ve seemed more real.
This felt different, though. After a big air raid the telephones were often down, letters got delayed, roads blocked. It might be a day or two before we heard from Sukie, and worried though I was, I knew she could look after herself. I wondered if it was part of Mum being ill, this painting the world black when it was grey.
My head was hurting again so I lay back against the pillows. I was fed up with this stupid, horrid war. Eighteen months ago when it started, everyone said it’d be over before Christmas, but they were wrong. It was still going on, tearing great holes in people’s lives. We’d already lost Dad, and half the time these days it felt like Mum wasn’t quite here. And now Sukie – who knew where she was?
I didn’t realise I was crying again until Mum touched my cheek.
‘It’s not fair,’ I said weakly.
‘War isn’t fair, I’m afraid,’ Mum replied. ‘You only have to walk through this hospital to see we’re not the only ones suffering. Though that’s just the top of the iceberg, believe me. There’s plenty worse going on in Europe.’
I remembered Sukie mentioning this too. She’d got really upset when she told me about the awful things happening to people Hitler didn’t like. She was in the kitchen chopping onions at the time so I wasn’t aware she was crying properly.
‘What sort of awful things?’ I’d asked her.
‘Food shortages, people being driven from their homes.’ Sukie took a deep breath, as if the list was really long. ‘People being attacked for no reason or sent no one knows where – Jewish people in particular. They’re made to wear yellow stars so everyone knows they’re Jews, and then barred from shops and schools and even parts of the towns where they live. It’s heartbreaking to think we can’t do anything about it.’
People threatened by soldiers. People queuing for food with stars on their coats. It was what I’d seen on last night’s newsreel at the cinema. My murky brain could just about remember those dismal scenes, and it made me even more angry. How I hated this lousy war.
I didn’t know what I could do about it, a thirteen-year-old girl with a bump on her head. Yet thinking there might be something made me feel a tiny bit better.
”
”
Emma Carroll (Letters from the Lighthouse)
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Top 31➡️ Best sites to Buy Telegram Accounts ➡️ (PVA & Aged)
Telegram Accounts
Telegram is a cloud-based instant messaging platform with an emphasis on speed and security. It is available for all major operating systems and devices, and the telegram.org website provides a web-based client. Telegram is a cloud-based instant messaging platform with an emphasis on speed and security. It is available for all major operating systems and devices, and the telegram.org website provides a web-based client.
Telegram is an instant messaging app that you can use with friends, colleagues, and loved ones around the world. Unlike traditional messaging apps, Telegram gives you the power to be creative with your chats, to create beautiful bots that help you achieve your daily tasks, and to share content with your friends in a way that you can’t with other messaging apps.
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Telegram was born thanks to the team’s passion for improving the speed, security, and reliability of messaging in the mobile ecosystem. Telegram is the fastest and most secure messaging service with a focus on speed, security and simplicity. With a focus on simplicity, Telegram is a cloud-based service that doesn’t require installing apps to your phone. Telegram’s amazing speed and security makes it the most popular chat application on Android, iPhone, and Windows Phone.
It’s been a while since Telegram has been updated with new features, and it just hit one-year-old birthday. To celebrate, the app is being updated with a fresh design, new stickers, new bots, new notifications, and more. The new design will be rolling out to all users on Android, Windows, and iOS over the coming days.
What are Telegram Accounts?
Telegram is a messaging app that offers end-to-end encryption and is hugely popular with Telegram users. Its one of the top messaging apps in the world – with about 150 million monthly active users. However, its a little known fact that the developers of Telegram have developed a separate client that combines the functionality of both Telegram and the main Telegram app into one interface.
Telegram is a messaging app for Android and iOS that allows you to exchange messages and media privately and securely. It features a rich, intuitive and accessible interface, and can run on a variety of devices. Telegram is free, fast, and open source, and has a very large community of users worldwide.
Telegram is a secure messaging app for iOS and Android. It’s super popular, with over 4 million users and growing rapidly. The app includes end-to-end encryption, meaning all messages—including attachments, photos, videos, and files—are protected. The app is also open source, which means you can see exactly how the app works. To send messages, every user has a unique, 60-character code, which is all you need to send messages.
Telegram is a free messaging app that’s popular among activists and politicians in Russia, Iran and Ukraine. The app has been blocked in Russia, but it has a massive user base in other countries.
Why should you buy Telegram Accounts?
Telegram is a messaging app that allows you to send messages to anyone in your contacts list. It’s free, works on all phones, and is easy to use. Since Telegram is so easy to use, you can use it to help with social situations. For example, if you’re in the same group chat as your parents, they can’t see your chats and messages. But you can use Telegram to send them a message that says: Hey, Mom! Can you pick me up at 10am tomorrow? I’ll be waiting in the car! That way, it’s a lot easier for your parents to pick you up, especially if they have to be at work when you get out of school.
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Top 31➡️ Best sites to Buy Telegram Accounts ➡️ (PVA & Aged)
“
Brendan McMahan
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“This brief overview of our situation does not lend itself to an optimistic forecast. Too many of our fellow citizens, year after year, have hidden themselves in the “riskless private sphere,” resting on the safe possession of their “private property,” staying out of political controversies, yielding political ground to increasingly pathological narratives and persons. At long last this “riskless private sphere” is no longer safe. The exits have been blocked. A confrontation is now unavoidable.”
― J.R. Nyquist
tags: ayn-rand, libertarianism
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in my quotes
“There is a silver lining to all this, according to Jean Bodin. If an insurrection fails, its poison is purged from the body politic. A deluded mob can be cured once its ringleaders are apprehended. And who are these ringleaders, in truth? At beginning of Bodin’s book, On Sovereignty, there is a listing of principles necessary to a well-ordered commonwealth. The cornerstone of these principles might surprise you. In the first place, wrote Bodin, right ordering involves distinguishing “a commonwealth from a band of thieves or pirates. With them one should have neither intercourse, commerce, nor alliance.”
― J.R. Nyquist
tags: ayn-rand, libertarianism
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in my quotes
“Since most whites are ashamed of America’s past treatment of blacks, they are susceptible to “white guilt.” This guilt is now being exploited to advance a communist agenda, as opposed to the color-blind agenda envisioned by conservatives. The political significance of this cannot be underestimated. According to Trevor Loudon, the organizations behind today’s revolutionary unrest are Maoist; that is, they are ideologically allied with the Chinese Communists in Beijing.
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Trevor Loudon
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Fill in your 168 hours with blocks of core-competency time. Broadly, figure out what hours you would like to be working, sleeping, nurturing your family and friends, and nurturing yourself—for example, engaging in structured leisure activities such as exercise, volunteering, or participating in religious activities. For longer-term projects on your “List of 100 Dreams,” schedule in the blocks of time associated with each actionable step.
”
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Laura Vanderkam (168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think)
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I take time blocking seriously, dedicating ten to twenty minutes every evening to building my schedule for the next day. During this planning process I consult my task lists and calendars, as well as my weekly and quarterly planning notes. My goal is to make sure progress is being made on the right things at the right pace for the relevant deadlines.
”
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Darius Foroux (Do It Today: Overcome Procrastination, Improve Productivity, and Achieve More Meaningful Things)
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Write Blocked (Rage of the Sea (Stuck Inside Minecraft #3))
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Pia taught fourth-grade princesses, superheroes and villains found at the Kshama Sawant International Elementary School near Greenlake. That building took up the whole block and had about five hundred students. She’d been teaching for a while. It was one of the few jobs that got a little extra salary because of the special training required. That list was short and included physicians and nurses, teachers, and pilots. Teaching also included a bonus of four hundred a month extra, which Pia spent on travel, and her cat. Others had hobbies they loved, or personal projects.
”
”
Ruth Ann Oskolkoff (Zin)
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Is there enough security for all? Security is the feeling that results from being confident that you will have all the things listed above, and your children will have them too. So it is a derivative effect. There can be enough security for all; but only if all have security. If one percent of the humans alive controlled everyone’s work, and took far more than their share of the benefits of that work, while also blocking the project of equality and sustainability however they could, that project would become more difficult. This would go without saying, except that it needs saying.
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Kim Stanley Robinson (The Ministry for the Future)
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The Time-Blocking Method is a replacement for your To-Do list of busywork. Yes, it is a To-Do list of sorts, but it’s a more intentional one, focused on the essential tasks.
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Luke Seavers (Time-Blocking: Your Method to Supercharge Productivity & Reach Your Goals)
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Making the Tradeoff Not all tasks are created equal, and by continuing to view all the tasks on our To-Do list as equal, I fear we are destined for a life of frustration and unfulfilled dreams. We may wake up one day and realize that our life has passed us by, and we wasted it. Stop allowing the high of “getting stuff done” deceive you into believing you’re being productive. What we must do is determine the essential tasks and give them our focus. It is the only way you will have success with Time-Blocking. If you Time-Block every hour of your day but don’t achieve the most important tasks, reach your goals, and achieve your highest purpose, then what good is it? What you need to understand is that saying “yes” to the essential tasks, requires saying “no” to almost all others.
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Luke Seavers (Time-Blocking: Your Method to Supercharge Productivity & Reach Your Goals)
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This means, for example, that instead of having a unique small box for each small task on your plate for the day—respond to boss’s e-mail, submit reimbursement form, ask Carl about report—you can batch similar things into more generic task blocks. You might find it useful, in this case, to draw a line from a task block to the open right-hand side of the page where you can list out the full set of small tasks you plan to accomplish in that block. When you’re done scheduling your day, every minute should be part of a block. You have, in effect, given every minute of your workday a job. Now as you go through your day, use this schedule to guide you.
”
”
Cal Newport (Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)
“
A Tidy and Organized Home… Makes you feel calm. You can relax and unwind in a tidy home. There is space to do things, and you know where everything is. When you walk into a hotel room, you immediately feel a sense of peace because the environment is tidy and organized. Makes you feel healthy. Dust and mold accumulate in messes. Are you always coughing and sneezing? Do you suffer from allergies? It’s probably because you are breathing in all the dirt in your home. Give your home a spring clean and your health issues will improve. Makes you feel in control. How does it feel when you know where everything is? Clutter prevents positive energy from flowing through your home. Remember, energy attaches itself to objects, and negative energy is attracted to mess, which creates exhaustion, stagnation, and exasperation. What does it feel like when negative energy is stuck in your body? You want to lie in bed and shut the world away because everything becomes more difficult and you can’t explain why. Here is how decluttering your house will unlock blocked streams of positive energy: You will become more vibrant. Once you create harmony and order in your home, you will feel more radiant and present. Like acupuncture, which removes imbalances and blockages from the body to create more wellness and dynamism, clearing clutter removes imbalances and blockages from your personal space. When you venture through spaces that have been set ablaze with fresh energy, you are captured by inspiration, and the most attractive parts of your personality come to life. You will get rid of bad habits and introduce good ones. All bad habits have triggers. Do you lie on your bed to watch TV instead of sitting on the couch because you can’t be bothered to fold the laundry that has piled up over the past six months? Or because the bed represents sleep, and when you come home from work and get into bed, you are going to fall asleep instead of doing those important tasks on your to-do list. Once you tidy the couch, coming home from work will allow you to sit on it to watch your favorite TV program but get up once it’s finished and do what you need to do. You will improve your problem-solving skills. When your home has been opened up with a clear space, it’s easier to focus, which provides you with a fresh perspective on your problems. You will sleep better. Are you always tired no matter how much sleep you get? That’s because negative energy is stuck under your bed amongst all that junk you’ve stuffed under there. Once you tidy up your bedroom, you will find that positive energy can flow freely around your room making it easier for you to have a deep and restful sleep. You will have more time. Mess delays you. An untidy house means you are always losing things. You can’t find a shoe, a sock, or your keys, so you waste time searching for them, which makes you late for work or social gatherings. When you declutter your home, you could save about an hour a day because you will no longer need to dig through a stack of items to find things. Your intuition will be stronger. A clear space creates a sense of certainty and clarity. You know where everything is, so you have peace of mind. When you have peace of mind, you can focus on being in the present moment. When you need to make important decisions, you will find it easier to do so. It might take some time to give your home a deep clean, but you won’t be sorry for it once it’s done. Chapter 5: How To Become an Assertive Empath The word assertive means “having or showing a confident and forceful personality.
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Judy Dyer (The Empowered Empath: A Simple Guide on Setting Boundaries, Controlling Your Emotions, and Making Life Easier)
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One noble died of treason, but there was always another who would continue plotting. Treason remains on the statute book, enshrined in law today, though not an oft used law. When we think of treason and tyrannical monarchs, Henry VIII is usually pretty high on the list. He redefined treason to be what he wanted it to be and, as a result, opened the doors to multitudes of treason trials and the depletion of the English nobility.
”
”
Helene Harrison (Tudor Executions: From Nobility to the Block)
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Richard had taken the Bimbo off his visiting list and had told Doreen that if he was moved to East block he would marry her. Since the first time she’d seen Richard on TV being taken away from the angry mob on Hubbard Street, she had wanted to marry him, to fight his battles, to be known as Mrs. Richard Ramirez.
”
”
Philip Carlo (The Night Stalker: The Disturbing Life and Chilling Crimes of Richard Ramirez)
“
Personally, I suck at efficiency (doing things quickly). To compensate and cope, here’s my 8-step process for maximizing efficacy (doing the right things): Wake up at least 1 hour before you have to be at a computer screen. Email is the mind-killer. Make a cup of tea (I like pu-erh) and sit down with a pen/pencil and paper. Write down the 3 to 5 things—and no more—that are making you the most anxious or uncomfortable. They’re often things that have been punted from one day’s to-do list to the next, to the next, to the next, and so on. Most important usually equals most uncomfortable, with some chance of rejection or conflict. For each item, ask yourself: “If this were the only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day?” “Will moving this forward make all the other to-dos unimportant or easier to knock off later?” Put another way: “What, if done, will make all of the rest easier or irrelevant?” Look only at the items you’ve answered “yes” to for at least one of these questions. Block out at 2 to 3 hours to focus on ONE of them for today. Let the rest of the urgent but less important stuff slide. It will still be there tomorrow. TO BE CLEAR: Block out at 2 to 3 HOURS to focus on ONE of them for today. This is ONE BLOCK OF TIME. Cobbling together 10 minutes here and there to add up to 120 minutes does not work. No phone calls or social media allowed. If you get distracted or start procrastinating, don’t freak out and downward-spiral; just gently come back to your ONE to-do. Congratulations! That’s it. This is the only way I can create big outcomes despite my never-ending impulse to procrastinate, nap, and otherwise fritter away days with bullshit. If I have 10 important things to do in a day, it’s 100% certain nothing important will get done that day. On the other hand, I can usually handle one must-do item and block out my lesser behaviors for 2 to 3 hours a day. It doesn’t take much to seem superhuman and appear “successful” to nearly everyone around you. In fact, you just need one rule: What you do is more important than how you do everything else, and doing something well does not make it important. If you consistently feel the counterproductive need for volume and doing lots of stuff, put these on a Post-it note: Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.
”
”
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
“
Non Fungible Tokens or NFTs are units of data stored on a digital ledger called blockchain, a growing list of records/blocks linked together using cryptography.
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leanmean
“
Chains.” Andel was writing on his list again, already moving on to the next item.
I raised my finger again. “Excuse me, chains?”
“To tie him to the bed,” Andel explained, like it was obvious. “We’ll also need a potion to knock him unconscious, a strong wine to mask the scent of the potion, and the chains will need to be artefacts to block his magic. It won’t hold him back for long, but it might be long enough.”
“This is starting to sound very rapey.
”
”
Jane Washington (A Castle of Ash (A Tempest of Shadows, #4))
“
You commit a crime if you support and collaborate with hired members of the criminal intelligence agencies who approach you to eliminate the truth. Sure, you also perpetrate and exploit the rules in an unfair context; indeed, it obtains a desired outcome that victimizes the victim.”
“As a human, I love and respect all people; I fight for others’ rights as an advocate of humanity; and I also bring to justice those who commit crimes and misdeeds, regardless of distinctions, even if I face the consequences and victimization. Despite that, I never hesitate to exercise and practice it, feeling and learning that if death is everyone’s fate and destiny, then why not accept it in such a glorious way?”
After being victimized by fake accounts of Rumi and the son of a shit, Sa Sha, on social media, I blocked them. However, they cannot escape from the inhuman crimes that they have been committing on social media while living in a civilized society.
He, the son of a snake, and she, the shit of a snake, disappeared, working together to victimize me for many years with the consent of criminal intelligence agencies and Qadiyanis, the followers of a fake religion of a fake Jesus.
More than a decade ago, their profiles started with fake names; behind that were a top cheater, criminal, inhuman, sadist, pretender, and worse than a beast, with the conspiracy of other criminals. However, I became the victim of those criminals and inhuman nature who succeeded in putting me on the death list.
In 2020, the criminal’s chief and his gang from Canada, Germany, the USA, Australia, the Netherlands, Pakistan, India, the Middle East, and around the world, along with other criminals, succeeded in deleting an article on me on Wikipedia and sending abusive, insulting, and discriminating emails to my immediate family.
They remained in their criminal ways to defame and damage me, but they significantly failed and faced the penalty for their wrong deeds by God and the law of the world.
Despite that, they reached their mental match once to further victimize me; this time, they were directly on my social media, but through their team of evil-minded people to victimize, harass, threaten, and damage my writings, label restrictions, and lock my account every time. Read this underlined link in detail. As a result, I became compulsive enough to deactivate my profile on Twitter to stay away from all such scoundrels.
Alas, deactivated Twitter account will automatically become deleted forever after thirty days; consequently, I will lose more than one hundred thousand tweets and my post data because of Elon Musk and his dastard team, who support the political mafia and forced me to remove a screenshot of a Wikipedia article that was illegitimately removed as they harassed me by tagging, restricting, and locking my account and asking my ID card to transfer my privacy to third parties of political criminals and to make my opponents happy. It is a crime to restrict freedom of expression through such tactics under the umbrella of community behaviour.
”
”
Ehsan Sehgal
“
Wake up at least 1 hour before you have to be at a computer screen. Email is the mind-killer. Make a cup of tea (I like pu-erh) and sit down with a pen/pencil and paper. Write down the 3 to 5 things—and no more—that are making you the most anxious or uncomfortable. They’re often things that have been punted from one day’s to-do list to the next, to the next, to the next, and so on. Most important usually equals most uncomfortable, with some chance of rejection or conflict. For each item, ask yourself: “If this were the only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day?” “Will moving this forward make all the other to-dos unimportant or easier to knock off later?” Put another way: “What, if done, will make all of the rest easier or irrelevant?” Look only at the items you’ve answered “yes” to for at least one of these questions. Block out at 2 to 3 hours to focus on ONE of them for today. Let the rest of the urgent but less important stuff slide. It will still be there tomorrow. TO BE CLEAR: Block out at 2 to 3 HOURS to focus on ONE of them for today. This is ONE BLOCK OF TIME. Cobbling together 10 minutes here and there to add up to 120 minutes does not work. No phone calls or social media allowed. If you get distracted or start procrastinating, don’t freak out and downward-spiral; just gently come back to your ONE to-do.
”
”
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
“
As much as my father was there during my childhood, he was also not there. He had an introversion common to Finns, and to engineers. He avoided eye contact. If he was growing up today, I’m curious what a psychiatrist would make of him. He had a boyhood habit of stimming, rocking back and forth to soothe himself. In his 20s, he had a compulsive blinking tic. In his middle age, he kept a notebook listing every winning Dallas lotto number, recorded in his careful, geometrically precise block lettering. A futile attempt at charting randomness.
”
”
Sarah Hepola (Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget)
“
Meanwhile, Facebook censors Palestinian groups so often that they have created their own hashtag, #FBCensorsPalestine. That the groups have become prominent matters little: in 2016, Facebook blocked accounts belonging to editors at the Quds News Network and Shehab News Agency in the West Bank; it later apologized and restored the accounts.30 The following year, it did the same to the official account of Fatah, the ruling party in the West Bank.31 A year after Facebook’s relationship with the Israelis was formalized, the Guardian released a set of leaked documents exposing the ways the company’s moderation policy discriminates against Palestinians and other groups. Published in a series called “The Facebook Files,” the documents contained slides from manuals used to train content moderators. On the whole, the leaks paint a picture of a disjointed and disorganized company where the community standards are expanded piecemeal, and little attention is given to their consequences. Anna, the former Facebook operations specialist I spoke with, agrees: “There’s no ownership of processes from beginning to end.” One set of documents demonstrate with precision the imbalance on the platform between Palestinians and Israelis (and the supporters of both). In a slide deck entitled “Credible Violence: Abuse Standards,” one slide lists global and local “vulnerable” groups; alongside “foreigners” and “homeless people” is “Zionists.”32 Interestingly, while Zionists are protected as a special category, “migrants,” as ProPublica has reported, are only “quasi-protected” and “Black children” aren’t protected at all.33 In trying to understand how such a decision came about, I reached out to numerous contacts, but only one spoke about it on the record. Maria, who worked in community operations until 2017, told me that she spoke up against the categorization when it was proposed. “We’d say, ‘Being a Zionist isn’t like being a Hindu or Muslim or white or Black—it’s like being a revolutionary socialist, it’s an ideology,’” she told me. “And now, almost everything related to Palestine is getting deleted.
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Jillian York (Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism)
“
Carve out and then ritualize thirty minutes early each Sunday morning to create your “Blueprint for a Beautiful Week.” Start the process by writing a story in your journal about the highlights from the seven days you just lived. Then record your lessons learned and optimizations for making the coming week even better. Next, on a large piece of paper that has each day running from 5 AM to 11 PM on it, note down all your commitments. The key here is to list more than your business meetings and work projects. Set clear periods for your Victory Hour, your 90/90/1 sessions, your 60/10 cycles and your 2nd Wind Workouts, as well as time for your loved ones, blocks for your portfolio of passions and segments for your errands. Doing this weekly will build extraordinary focus into your days, yield marvelous momentum, enhance your productivity significantly and improve your life’s balance noticeably.
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Robin Sharma (The 5AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life.)
“
Until now, I have always thought of things in terms of whether or not they could be useful to me in some way. But that may have become my stumbling block. Now I know the importance of the heart being moved, I have a list of things I want to try. Learn to make buckwheat soba noodles, for one, and tour historical sites and do English-conversation lessons online, on the computer that Yoriko taught me how to use. I’d even like to try wool felting. And if I happen to see any job-vacancy posting that moves me, then I might give that a try too.
”
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Michiko Aoyama (What You Are Looking for Is in the Library)
“
This free Online website tool allows you to open multiple URLs at the same time. It's the easy and helpful tool which provides researchers, SEOs or any website visitor with the ability to open multiple URLs from a list of website links or from a block of text. Just Paste the Multiple URLs in the box that you want to open
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”
Multiple url opener
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Newbury Street was the tony promenade listed in every Boston guidebook, beginning downtown at the Public Garden and riding out in orderly alphabetical blocks, Arlington to Berkeley to Clarendon, all the way to Hereford before skipping impatiently to M, the broad Massachusetts Avenue that formed the unofficial western border of the Back Bay. Newbury Street continued beyond that dividing line, but with its spirit broken, forced to run alongside the ugly turnpike more or less as a back alley for Commonwealth Avenue, its humiliation ending at the suicide bridge.
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Chuck Hogan (Prince of Thieves)
“
Everyone is born with this knowing,” said Audrey. “But the adults, with their wounds and their lists and the trivial things that seem to matter to them but really do not matter at all, forget about this knowing. They let pain and loss and heartache block the doorways.
”
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Patti Callahan Henry (The Secret Book of Flora Lea)
“
Increase Your Productivity We live in a demanding and distracting world. Being productive can sometimes feel like an impossible feat. Here are three ways to get more done without burning out: Keep one to-do list. Include everything you want or need to do in one place. Writing it down helps get it off your mind and leaves you free to focus on the task at hand. Do the most important thing first. Before you leave work in the evening, decide what one thing you need to accomplish the next day. Do it first thing in the morning, when you’re likely to have the most energy and fewest distractions. Schedule time for non-urgent things. It’s easy to get caught up in the pressing issues of the day. Block off time in your calendar to do things that would otherwise get squeezed out, like writing, thinking creatively, or building relationships.
”
”
Anonymous
“
Steven’s words slush together as he gets to his feet. “Crossing this one off the bucket list.” Then he
unbuckles his belt and grabs the waist of his pants—yanking the suckers down to his ankles—tighty
whities and all.
Every guy in the car holds up his hands to try to block the spectacle. We groan and complain. “My
eyes! They burn!”
“Put the boa constrictor back in his cage, man.”
“This is not the ass I planned on seeing tonight.”
Our protests fall on deaf ears. Steven is a man on a mission. Wordlessly, he squats and shoves his lilywhite
ass out the window—mooning the gaggle of grannies in the car next to us.
I bet you thought this kind of stuff only happened in movies.
He grins while his ass blows in the wind for a good ninety seconds, ensuring optimal viewage. Then
he pulls his slacks up, turns around, and leans out the window, laughing. “Enjoying the full moon, ladies?”
Wow. Steven usually isn’t the type to visually assault the elderly.
Without warning, his crazy cackling is cut off. He’s silent for a beat, then I hear him choke out a single
strangled word.
“Grandma?”
....
Matthew and I wave and smile and in fourth-grader-like, singsong harmony call out, “Hi, Mrs.
Reinhart.”
She shakes one wrinkled fist in our direction. Then her poofy-haired companion in the backseat flips
us the bird. I’m pretty sure it’s the funniest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen.
The two of us collapse back into our seats, laughing hysterically.
”
”
Emma Chase (Tied (Tangled, #4))
“
Ini and Aevi were entranced by his description of a curriculum that included farming, cparnetry, sewage reclamation, printing, plumbing, road mending, playwriting, and al the other occupations of the adult community, and by his admission that nobody was ever punished for anything.
“Though sometimes,” he said, “they make you go away by yourself for a while.”
“But what,” Oiie said abruptly, as if the question, long kept back, burst from him under pressure, “what keeps people in order? Why don’t they rob and murder each other?”
“Nobody owns anything to rob. If you want things you take them from the depository,. As for violence, well, I don’t know, Oiie; would you mruder me, ordinarily? And if you felt like it, would a law against it stop you? Coercsion is the least efficient means of obtaining order.”
“All right, but how do you et peopled to do the dirty work?”
“What dirty work?” asked Oiie’s wife, not following.
“Garbage collecting, grave digging,” Oiie said. Sheik added, “Mercury mining,” and nearly said, “Shit processing,” but recollected the Ioti taboo on scatological words. He had reflected, quite early in his stay on Urras, that the Urasti lived among mountains of excrement, but never mentioned shit.
“Well, we all do them. But nobody has to do them for very long, unless he likes the work. One day in each decade the community management committee or the block committee or whoever needs you can ask you to join in such work; they make rotating lists. Then the disagreeable work postings, or ‘dangerous ones like the mercury mines and mills, normally they’re for one half year only.”
“But then the whole personal must consist of people just learning the job.”
“Yes. It’s not efficient, but what else is to be done? You can’t tell a man to work on a job that will cripple him or kill him in a few years. Why should he do that?”
“He can refuse the order?”
“It’s not an order, Oiie. He goes to Divlab- the Division of Labor office- and says, I want to do such and such, what have you got? And they tell him where there are jobs.
”
”
Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia)
“
NBA 2K18 Wishlist - Good Badges To Deal Problems In 2K17
The NBA 2K18 release date has basketball fans hyped. The new game in the series will be the definitive way for fans to take control of their favorite franchises and players on the Xbox One and PS4. As of the features player wish to be added into NBA 2K18, we can compare it with NBA 2K17. Today, we'll list the best badges players would like to see in the latest NBA franchise.
Flashy Dunker
2K Sports has spent a large amount of time recording flashy dunk animations that look great when they trigger. Unfortunately players do not equip any of these because they get blocked at a higher rate than the basic one and two hand dunk packages. NBA 2K17 has posterizer to help with contact dunks but Flashy Dunker would be for non-contact animations. The badge would allow you to use these flashy dunk packages in traffic while getting blocked at a lower rate in NBA 2K18.
Bullet Passer Badge
Even with a high passer rating and Hall of Fame dimer you can still find yourself throwing slow lob passes inexplicably. These passes are easy to intercept and give the defense too much time to recover. Bullet Passer would be an increase in the speed of passes that you throw, allowing you to create open looks for teammates in 2K18 that were not possible in NBA 2K17. A strong passing game is more important than ISO ball and this badge would help with that style of play.
3 And D Badge
The 3 and D badge would be an archetype in NBA 2K18 ideally but a badge version would be an acceptable substitute. This badge would once again reward players for playing good defense. The badge would trigger after a block, steal, or good shot defense and would lead to an increase in shooting percentage on the next possession from behind the 3 point arc.
Dominant Post Presence Badge
It's a travesty that post scorer is one of the more under-utilized archetypes in NBA 2K17. Many players that have created a post scorer can immediately tell you why they do not play it as much as their other MyPlayers, it is incredibly easy to lose the ball in the post. Whether it is a double team or your matchup, getting the ball poked loose is a constant problem. Dominant Post Presence would trigger when you attempt to post up and would be an increase in your ability to maintain possession of the ball as long as NBA 2K18 add this badge. In addition the badge would be an increase in the shooting percentage of your teammate when you pass out of the post to an open man.
The Glove
NBA 2K17 has too many contested shots. The shot contest rating on most archetypes is not enough to outweigh the contested midrange or 3 point rating and consistently force misses. It's obviously that height helps you contest shots in a major way but it also slows you down. However, the Glove would solve this problem in NBA 2K18. This badge would increase your ability to contest shots effectively, forcing more misses and allowing you to play better defense.
Of course, there should be more other tips and tricks for NBA 2K18. If you have better advices, tell us on the official media. The NBA 2K18 Early Tip-Off Weekend starts September 15th. That's a total of four days for dedicated fans to get in the game and try its new features before other buyers. The game is completely unlocked for Early Tip-Off Weekend. Be sure to make enough preparation for the upcoming event.
”
”
Bunnytheis
“
Add the items in inventory. Drop items to get more duplicated items. Now, pause. After this, click “Save and Quit to Title.” Play Minecraft by using dropped items. Pick up the items. Now, pause again, and wait a bit too save. Exit Minecraft. Now, open your game again, and see those duplicated items added to your list. This works well with diamonds. #
”
”
BlockBoy (Tips and Tricks Handbook for Minecraft: AMAZING Tips, Tricks, Secrets and Glitches That Will Help You Master Minecraft (MineGuides))
“
A decade earlier, her seventy-four-year-old father, Jack Block, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, was admitted to a San Francisco hospital with symptoms from what proved to be a mass growing in the spinal cord of his neck. She flew out to see him. The neurosurgeon said that the procedure to remove the mass carried a 20 percent chance of leaving him quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down. But without it he had a 100 percent chance of becoming quadriplegic. The evening before surgery, father and daughter chatted about friends and family, trying to keep their minds off what was to come, and then she left for the night. Halfway across the Bay Bridge, she recalled, “I realized, ‘Oh, my God, I don’t know what he really wants.’” He’d made her his health care proxy, but they had talked about such situations only superficially. So she turned the car around. Going back in “was really uncomfortable,” she said. It made no difference that she was an expert in end-of-life discussions. “I just felt awful having the conversation with my dad.” But she went through her list. She told him, “‘ I need to understand how much you’re willing to go through to have a shot at being alive and what level of being alive is tolerable to you.’ We had this quite agonizing conversation where he said—and this totally shocked me—‘ Well, if I’m able to eat chocolate ice cream and watch football on TV, then I’m willing to stay alive. I’m willing to go through a lot of pain if I have a shot at that.’” “I would never have expected him to say that,
”
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Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End)
“
Let’s hurry up and get those supplies,” he said. He kept adding more and more items to the list, some of which they’d need to purchase at the grocery store or borrow from people in the hackerspace, a few blocks away. “Damn damn damn,” Sougata kept saying under his breath. “Damn, it’s all over, I’m so sorry Priya.” Anya put her hand on Sougata’s shoulder.
”
”
Charlie Jane Anders (All the Birds in the Sky)
“
Neurotic: The one who is so obsessed with himself or herself, that believes everything I post on facebook is a personalized message, and reacts with depression, anger or revenge, towards everything he or she reads. Also the delusional one who thinks by unfriending me or blocking me on facebook such will cause me some sort of personal trauma, as if I wasn't pleased to see my facebook list cleaning itself and by itself without any effort from my side. Neurotics are often offended by the truth or have a horrible phobia for arguments they can't fight against, and truly believe that in a perfect society everyone should have their words filtered by a higher authority before speaking, while assuming that freedom of speech is the freedom to talk or write what others expect to hear or read. They also think that as long as they refer to generalizing words before each sentence, such as "everybody", "people" and "normal", nobody will notice how deeply insane they are.
”
”
Robin Sacredfire
“
Neurotic: The one who is so obsessed with himself or herself, that believes everything I post on Facebook is a personalized message, and reacts with depression, anger or revenge, towards everything he or she reads. Also the delusional one who thinks by unfriending me or blocking me on Facebook such will cause me some sort of personal trauma, as if I wasn't pleased to see my Facebook list cleaning itself and by itself without any effort from my side. Neurotics are often offended by the truth or possess a horrible phobia for arguments they can't fight against, and truly believe that in a perfect society everyone should have their words filtered by a higher authority before expressing a viewpoint, while assuming that freedom of speech is the freedom to talk or write what others expect to hear or read. They also think that as long as they start each sentence with generalizations like "everybody", "everyone", "people", "many", "all", "always" and "normal", nobody will notice how deeply unreasonable, illogical, unjustifiable and insane they really are.
”
”
Robin Sacredfire
“
So where are you two headed?”
Linc put the kitten down. Tiny tail waving, it sauntered between Truck’s furry legs. The dog didn’t seem to mind.
“Oh--out and about,” Kenzie said.
She and Linc exchanged a look. “You tell him,” he said.
“We stopped by to see Christine first. You were next on the list.”
“Beg pardon? What list?”
“Friends and family.” Kenzie stretched out her left hand and wiggled her fingers. An oval diamond set in platinum caught the sun.
Jim’s eyes widened.
“Way to go.” He beamed at both of them. “That’s one hell of a rock. You didn’t waste any time.” He gave Linc a nod of masculine approval. “So when’s the big day?”
“We haven’t decided,” Kenzie answered.
She didn’t want to say that they were keeping a low profile for as long as possible. The media furor over SKC had died down, but they were helping with the ongoing investigation.
Life went on. Love had amazing power to heal.
Truck picked up on the excitement and edged between the three of them, blocking the hug about to happen.
“Routine stuff, Linc. He has final say,” Jim teased.
The black-and-white dog took his time about it. Then he sat down in front of Linc, brushing his tail across the floor in wide waves.
“He approves,” Kenzie said.
“Never argue with a good dog.” Jim laughed. “All right, you two. Get out of here. I have work to do.”
Kenzie got a hug in before he went back to his desk.
“Congratulations.” He nodded toward the picture of his wife. “From me and Josie. She’ll be over the moon when she hears.
”
”
Janet Dailey (Honor (Bannon Brothers, #2))
“
When he died penniless in 1880, more than 30,000 people lined Market Street for his funeral procession. In the 1890s, the gauntlet passed to Mayor Adolph Sutro, who used his fortune from the Comstock Lode silver mine to build monuments to himself, including the Sutro Baths, an indoor swimming complex next to the Cliff House that was more elaborate than the fantasy pools in Hawaii. The Baths closed when I was a kid, but you can still see the ruins. Over the decades, other luminaries included beat poets Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, a stripper named Carol Doda who headlined the city’s first topless club a few blocks from where we were sitting, and a high-end madam named Sally Stanford who became a restauranteur and later the Mayor of Sausalito. The list would not be complete without mentioning flamboyant lawyers like Melvin Belli, Jake Ehrlich, Vincent Hallinan, Tony Serra, and Nate Cohn. Nick “the Dick” was one of San Francisco’s few
”
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Sheldon Siegel (Felony Murder Rule (Mike Daley/Rosie Fernandez Mystery, #8))
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The Book of Lists* produced a rather famous collection of fears that surprised many of us when the top five turned out to be: 1. Speaking before a group 2. Heights 3. Insects and bugs 4. Financial problems 5. Deep water Newer lists have come out since, with few changes, other than the fear of flying, making their way into the top five. However, I maintain there is another fear that doesn’t appear on any list and yet is a stumbling block for us all. What’s more, it is a far more personally destructive fear. I’m referring to the fear of change.
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Rob Jolles (How to Change Minds: The Art of Influence without Manipulation)
“
When you are contemplating a job or career change, anxiety can be a large stumbling block. Hand in hand with anxiety goes low self-esteem, which can be especially detrimental during the job search. Employers respond best to those who project a comfortable, confident, and motivated self-image. If your anxiety is uncontrolled, it may mask your underlying confidence and motivation. As you do the exercises in this chapter, consider whether your anxiety is causing you to sell yourself short. If you find it difficult to list your capabilities and skills, you may wish to ask for some objective help from a friend, family member, or professional. And if anxiety is so high that it keeps you from focusing effectively on these exercises, you should try to use the various stress management strategies you have learned thus far in order to approach the project from a perspective of personal calm.
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Jonathan Berent (Beyond Shyness: How to Conquer Social Anxieties)
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Neurotic: The one who is so obsessed with himself or herself, that believes everything I post on facebook is a personalized message, and reacts with depression, anger or revenge, towards everything he or she reads. Also the delusional one who thinks by unfriending me or blocking me on facebook such will cause me some sort of personal trauma, as if I wasn't pleased to see my facebook list cleaning itself and by itself without any effort from my side. Neurotics are often offended by the truth or have a horrible phobia for arguments they can't fight against, and truly believe that in a perfect society everyone should have their words filtered by a higher authority before expressing a viewpoint, while assuming that freedom of speech is the freedom to talk or write what others expect to hear or read. They also think that as long as they start each sentence with generalizing words such as "everybody", "everyone", "people", "all" and "normal", nobody will notice how deeply insane they are.
”
”
Robin Sacredfire
“
Although they did not know it at the time, the Royal Navy was so complacent about its ability to crack codes that it was unaware that its own naval codes were being read every day by the German navy, and had been since 1936. What brought Ramsay back from retirement in the Scottish borders was the war scare in September 1938, when the nation came so close to going to war over Czechoslovakia. In the week of what became the Munich Crisis, the navy awoke to the fact that war was imminent and they had not really prepared for it. They searched their lists, including the Retired List, for any officers with the right expertise. Ramsay was known as an effective leader and had made his name as part of the Dover Patrol in the First World War, and the Admiralty needed a flag officer to take charge of the front line port of Dover who was capable of blocking the English Channel to enemy shipping and submarines
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David Boyle (Dunkirk: A Miracle of Deliverance (The Storm of War Book 2))
“
Gentile’s office in downtown Las Vegas, I got on the elevator and turned around and there was a TV camera. It was just the two of us in the little box, me and the man with the big machine on his shoulder. He was filming me as I stood there silent. “Turn the camera off,” I said. He didn’t. I tried to move away from him in the elevator, and somehow in the maneuvering he bumped my chin with the black plastic end of his machine and I snapped. I slugged him, or actually I slugged the camera. He turned it off. The maids case was like a county fair compared with the Silverman disappearance, which had happened in the media capital of the world. It had happened within blocks of the studios of the three major networks and the New York Times. The tabloids reveled in the rich narrative of the case, and Mom and Kenny became notorious throughout the Western Hemisphere. Most crimes are pedestrian and tawdry. Though each perpetrator has his own rap sheet and motivation and banged-up psyche, the crime blotter is very repetitive. A wife beater kills his wife. A crack addict uses a gun to get money for his habit. Liquor-store holdups, domestic abuse, drug dealer shoot-outs, DWIs, and so on. This one had a story line you could reduce to a movie pitch. Mother/Son Grifters Held in Millionaire’s Disappearance! My mother’s over-the-top persona, Kenny’s shady polish, and the ridiculous rumors of mother-son incest gave the media a narrative it couldn’t resist. Mom and Kenny were the smart, interesting, evil criminals with the elaborate, diabolical plan who exist in fiction and rarely in real life. The media landed on my life with elephant feet. I was under siege as soon as I returned to my office after my family’s excursion to Newport Beach. The deluge started at 10 A.M. on July 8, 1998. I kept a list in a drawer of the media outlets that called or dropped by our little one-story L-shaped office building on Decatur. It was a tabloid clusterfuck. Every network, newspaper, local news station, and wire service sent troops. Dateline and 20/20 competed to see who could get a Kimes segment on-air first. Dateline did two shows about Mom and Kenny. I developed a strategy for dealing with reporters. My unusual training in the media arts as the son of Sante, and as a de facto paralegal in the maids case, meant that I had a better idea of how to deal with reporters than my staff did. They might find it exciting that someone wanted to talk to them, and forget to stop at “No comment.” I knew better. So I hid from the camera crews in a back room, so there’d be no pictures, and I handled the calls myself. I told my secretary not to bother asking who was on the line and to transfer all comers back to me. I would get the name and affiliation of the reporter, write down the info on my roster, and
”
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Kent Walker (Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America (True Crime (Avon Books)))
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DAY 25: What specific instructions did Paul give Timothy that would apply to a young person? A young person seeking to live as a disciple of Jesus Christ can find essential guidelines in 4:12–16, where Paul listed five areas (verse 12) in which Timothy was to be an example to the church: 1. In “word” or speech—see also Matthew 12:34–37; Ephesians 4:25, 29, 31. 2. In “conduct” or righteous living—see also Titus 2:10; 1 Peter 1:15; 2:12; 3:16. 3. In “love” or self-sacrificial service for others—see also John 15:13. 4. In “faith” or faithfulness or commitment, not belief—see also 1 Corinthians 4:2. 5. In “purity” and particularly sexual purity—see also 4:2. The verses that follow hold several other building blocks to a life of discipleship: 1. Timothy was to be involved in the public reading, study, and application of Scripture (v. 13). 2. Timothy was to diligently use his spiritual gift that others had confirmed and affirmed in a public way (v. 14). 3. Timothy was to be committed to a process of progress in his walk with Christ (v. 15). 4. Timothy was to “take heed” to pay careful attention to “yourself and to the doctrine” (v. 16). The priorities of a godly leader should be summed up in Timothy’s personal holiness and public teaching. All of Paul’s exhortations in vv. 6–16 fit into one or the other of those two categories. By careful attention to his own godly life and faithful preaching of the Word, Timothy would continue to be the human instrument God would use to bring the gospel and to save some who heard him. Though salvation is God’s work, it is His pleasure to do it through human instruments.
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John F. MacArthur Jr. (The MacArthur Daily Bible: Read through the Bible in one year, with notes from John MacArthur, NKJV)
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DAY 12: BUILD A SIMPLE SPEAKER ONE-SHEET Now that your flagship presentation has some texture and shape, you can summarize it on a speaker one-sheet. Local networking groups, chambers of commerce, and association chapters often want to see this before booking you to speak in front of your hand-selected target market of prospects. Lay out a simple one-sheet in Microsoft Word, or pay a little extra for a designer to format it more professionally. The building blocks are: 1. One or more Topics/Programs 2. Target Audience(s) 3. Benefits (especially in headlines and program titles) 4. Your Mini-Biography 5. Your Sample Client List 6. Testimonial clips about the quality of your programs 7. Your Contact Information
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David Newman (Do It! Marketing: 77 Instant-Action Ideas to Boost Sales, Maximize Profits, and Crush Your Competition)