Coincidence Short Quotes

There are no coincidences in life. What person that wandered in and out of your life was there for some purpose, even if they caused you harm. Sometimes, it doesn’t make sense the short periods of time we get with people, or the outcomes from their choices. However, if you turn it over to God he promises that you will see the big picture in the hereafter. Nothing is too small to be a mistake.

Time is too swift for those who fear, too long for those who wait, too short for those who finally find peace, but for those who love, time is eternal. For nothing is ever lost that God wants you to find.

Liberal attitudes towards the other are characterized both by respect for otherness, openness to it, and an obsessive fear of harassment. In short, the other is welcomed insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as it is not really the other. Tolerance thus coincides with its opposite. My duty to be tolerant towards the other effectively means that I should not get too close to him or her, not intrude into his space—in short, that I should respect his intolerance towards my over-proximity. This is increasingly emerging as the central human right of advanced capitalist society: the right not to be ‘harassed’, that is, to be kept at a safe distance from others.

Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last.

Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth - the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient "coincidences" and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist. Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal. Fred Hoyle, the distinguished cosmologist, once said it was as if "a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics". To see the problem, imagine playing God with the cosmos. Before you is a designer machine that lets you tinker with the basics of physics. Twiddle this knob and you make all electrons a bit lighter, twiddle that one and you make gravity a bit stronger, and so on. It happens that you need to set thirtysomething knobs to fully describe the world about us. The crucial point is that some of those metaphorical knobs must be tuned very precisely, or the universe would be sterile. Example: neutrons are just a tad heavier than protons. If it were the other way around, atoms couldn't exist, because all the protons in the universe would have decayed into neutrons shortly after the big bang. No protons, then no atomic nucleuses and no atoms. No atoms, no chemistry, no life. Like Baby Bear's porridge in the story of Goldilocks, the universe seems to be just right for life.

The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t.

It is perhaps little wonder that the end of Victorianism almost exactly coincided with the invention of psychoanalysis.

I went down, giving you my arm, at least one million of stairs and now that you are no more here it’s the void on every step. Also in such way our long journey has been short too. Mine still goes on, and I need no more coincidences, reservations, traps, shames of those who think that reality is that what you see. I went down millions of stairs giving you my arm not just because it’s better to see with four eyes than two. With you I went down because I knew that between us the only true pupils, though so much darkened, were yours

Thought fitted thought; opinion met opinion: we coincided, in short, perfectly.

But most critically, sweet, never try to change the narrative structure of someone else’s story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better. Increasing the scale, the depth of content, the universal themes. And I don’t care what those themes are – they’re yours to uncover and stand behind – so long as, at the very least, there is courage. Guts. Mut, in German. Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last.

In short, there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reckon on the unforeseen.

This was no coincidence. The best short stories and the most successful jokes have a lot in common. Each form relies on suggestion and economy. Characters have to be drawn in a few deft strokes. There's generally a setup, a reveal, a reversal, and a release. The structure is delicate. If one element fails, the edifice crumbles. In a novel you might get away with a loose line or two, a saggy paragraph, even a limp chapter. But in the joke and in the short story, the beginning and end are precisely anchored tent poles, and what lies between must pull so taut it twangs.

Respecting the dignity of a spectacular food means enjoying it at its best. Europeans celebrate the short season of abundant asparagus as a form of holiday. In the Netherlands the first cutting coincides with Father's Day, on which restaurants may feature all-asparagus menus and hand out neckties decorated with asparagus spears.

Also: seriously, broomsticks? He was going to fly on, basically, a line segment? Wasn't that pretty much the single most unstable shape you could possibly find, short of attempting to hold on to a point marble? Who'd selected that design for a flying device, out of all the possibilities? Harry had been hoping that it was just a figure of speech, but no, they were standing in front of what looked for all the world like ordinary wooden kitchen broomsticks. Had someone just gotten stuck on the idea of broomsticks and failed to consider anything else? It had to be. There was no way that the optimal designs for cleaning kitchens and flying would happen to coincide if you worked them out from scratch.

and no, no, I didn’t think it was a coincidence SS was short for sorority sister.

In short, there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss.

A native of the southern United States, the warbler was famous for its unusually lovely song, but its population numbers, never robust, gradually dwindled until by the 1930s the warbler vanished altogether and went unseen for many years. Then, in 1939, by happy coincidence two separate birding enthusiasts, in widely separated locations, came across lone survivors just two days apart. They both shot the birds.

Events don’t actually occur as often as people predict they will. And this in turn is related to hindsight bias (the tendency to see past events as being more predictable than they were at the time), which I’ll discuss shortly.

Sometimes I just wanted a break from it, but every time I looked forward to see if a break was possible, it never seemed like it could happen. I honestly thought I’d be that way forever, which sometimes made me wish that forever would be a really short time.

They are pursued by a pair of hawk-faced men dressed in black and white: both forbidding, both hungry, but one tall and slender, the other short and fat. Two reflections of the same soul in the cosmic house of mirrors, or uncanny coincidence? It is impossible to say.

Anyway,” the agent said abruptly. “I just . . . wanted you to know that I’m sorry for everything. I want to help you and the rest of the Order in any way I can, so if there is anything you need, you know where I am.” “Chase,” Dante said as the male turned to leave the room. “Apology accepted, man. And for what it’s worth, I’m sorry too. I haven’t been fair to you either. Despite our differences, know that I respect you. The Agency lost a good one the day they cut you loose.” Chase’s smile was crooked as he acknowledged the praise with a short nod. Dante cleared his throat. “And about that offer of help . . .” “Name it.” “Tess was walking a dog when the Rogues attacked her tonight. Ugly little mutt, not good for much more than a foot-warmer, but it’s special to her. Actually, it was a gift from me, more or less. Anyway, the dog was running loose on its leash when I saw it a block or so away from Ben Sullivan’s place.” “You want me to go retrieve a wayward canine, is that where this is heading?” “Well, you did say anything, didn’t you?” “So I did.” Chase chuckled. “All right. I will.” Dante dug his keys to his Porsche out of his pocket and tossed them to the other vampire. As Chase turned to be on his way again, Dante added, “The little beast answers to the name Harvard, by the way.” “Harvard,” Chase drawled, shaking his head and throwing a smirk in Dante’s direction. “I don’t suppose that’s a coincidence.” Dante shrugged. “Good to see that Ivy League pedigree of yours comes in handy for something.” “Jesus Christ, warrior. You really were busting my ass since the minute I came on board, weren’t you?” “Hey, by all comparisons, I was kind. Do yourself a favor and don’t look too closely at Niko’s shooting target, unless you’re very secure about your manhood.” “Assholes,” Chase muttered, but there was only humor in his tone. “Sit tight, and I’ll be back in a few with your mutt. Anything else you’re gonna hit me up for now that I opened my big yap about wanting to get square with you?” “Actually, there might be something else,” Dante replied, his thoughts going sober when he considered Tess and any kind of future that might be deserving of her. “But we can talk about that when you get back, yeah?” Chase nodded, catching on to the turn in mood. “Yeah. Sure we can.

People read more. It is no coincidence that the mid-nineteenth century saw a sudden and lasting boom in newspapers, magazines, books, and sheet music. The number of newspapers and periodicals in Britain leaped from fewer than 150 at the start of the century to almost 5,000 by the end of it.

About 15,000 BC, the Ice Age came to an end as the Earth’s climate warmed up. Evidence from the Greenland ice cores suggests that average temperatures rose by as much as fifteen degrees Celsius in a short span of time. This warming seems to have coincided with rapid increases in human populations as the global warming led to expanding animal populations and much greater availability of wild plants and foods. This process was put into rapid reverse at about 14,000 BC, by a period of cooling known as the Younger Dryas, but after 9600 BC, global temperatures rose again, by seven degrees Celsius in less than a decade, and have since stayed high. Archaeologist Brian Fagan calls it the Long Summer.

She was doubtful, amid our toxic swirl of new namegiving; what she doubted was the reality of names, though she had to deal with them; she certainly felt that naming is seldom accurate, name and thing coincide only for a short time. She shrank from stamping any name on herself, the brand mark which decides which herd you belong to and which stable you should occupy.

The average room with gas was twenty times brighter than it had been before. It wasn’t an intimate light–you couldn’t move it nearer your book or sewing, as you could a table lamp–but it provided wonderful overall illumination. It made reading, card-playing and even conversation more agreeable. Diners could see the condition of their food; they could find their way around delicate fishbones and know how much salt came out the hole. One could drop a needle and find it before daylight. Book titles became discernible on their shelves. People read more and stayed up later. It is no coincidence that the mid-nineteenth century saw a sudden and lasting boom in newspapers, magazines, books and sheet music. The number of newspapers and periodicals in Britain leapt from fewer than 150 at the start of the century to almost 5,000 by the end of it.

Love, that most banal of things, that most clichéd of religious motivations, had more power—Sol now knew—than did strong nuclear force or weak nuclear force or electromagnetism or gravity. Love was these other forces, Sol realized. The Void Which Binds, the subquantum impossibility that carried information from photon to photon, was nothing more or less than love. But could love—simple, banal love—explain the so-called anthropic principle which scientists had shaken their collective heads over for seven centuries and more—that almost infinite string of coincidences which had led to a universe that had just the proper number of dimensions, just the correct values on electron, just the precise rules for gravity, just the proper age to stars, just the right prebiologies to create just the perfect viruses to become just the proper DNAs—in short, a series of coincidences so absurd in their precision and correctness that they defied logic, defied understanding, and even defied religious interpretation. Love? For seven centuries the existence of Grand Unification Theories and hyperstring post-quantum physics and Core-given understanding of the universe as self-contained and boundless, without Big Bang singularities or corresponding endpoints, had pretty much eliminated any role of God—primitively anthropomorphic or sophisticatedly post-Einsteinian—even as a caretaker or pre-Creation former of rules. The modern universe, as machine and man had come to understand it, needed no Creator; in fact, allowed no Creator. Its rules allowed very little tinkering and no major revisions. It had not begun and would not end, beyond cycles of expansion and contraction as regular and self-regulated as the seasons on Old Earth. No room for love there.

EUGENIO MONTALE I went down, giving you my arm, at least one million of stairs and now that you are no more here it’s the void on every step. Also in such way our long journey has been short too. Mine still goes on, and I need no more coincidences, reservations, traps, shames of those who think that reality is that what you see. I went down millions of stairs giving you my arm not just because it’s better to see with four eyes than two. With you I went down because I knew that between us the only true pupils, though so much darkened, were yours.

From Bourcet he learnt the principle of calculated dispersion to induce the enemy to disperse their own concentration preparatory to the swift reuniting of his own forces. Also, the value of a 'plan with several branches', and of operating in a line which threatened alternative objectives. Moreover, the very plan which Napoleon executed in his first campaign was based on one that Bourcet had designed half a century earlier. Form Guibert he acquired an idea of the supreme value of mobility and fluidity of force, and of the potentialities inherent in the new distribution of an army in self-contained divisions. Guibert had defined the Napoleonic method when he wrote, a generation earlier: 'The art is to extend forces without exposing them, to embrace the enemy without being disunited, to link up the moves or the attacks to take the enemy in flank without exposing one's own flank.' And Guibert's prescription for the rear attack, as the means of upsetting the enemy's balance, became Napoleon's practice. To the same source can be traced Napoleon's method of concentrating his mobile artillery to shatter, and make a breach at, a key point in the enemy's front. Moreover, it was the practical reforms achieved by Guibert in the French army shortly before the Revolution which fashioned the instrument that Napoleon applied. Above all, it was Guibert's vision of a coming revolution in warfare, carried out by a man who would arise from a revolutionary state, that kindled the youthful Napoleon's imagination and ambition. While Napoleon added little to the ideas he had imbibed, he gave them fulfilment. Without his dynamic application the new mobility might have remained merely a theory. Because his education coincided with his instincts, and because these in turn were given scope by his circumstances, he was able to exploit the full possibilities of the new 'divisional' system. In developing the wider range of strategic combinations thus possible Napoleon made his chief contribution to strategy.

This was no coincidence. The best short stories and the most successful jokes have a lot in common. Each form relies on suggestion and economy. Characters have to be drawn in a few deft strokes. There's generally a setup, a reveal, a reversal, and a release. The structure is delicate. If one element fails, the edifice crumbles. In a novel you might get away with a loose line or two, a saggy paragraph, even a limp chapter. But in the joke and in the short story, the beginning and end are precisely anchored tent poles, and what lies between must pull so taut it twangs. I'm not sure if there is any pattern to these selections. I did not spend a lot of time with those that seemed afraid to tell stories, that handled plot as if it were a hair in the soup, unwelcome and embarrassing. I also tended not to revisit stories that seemed bleak without having earned it, where the emotional notes were false, or where the writing was tricked out or primped up with fashionable devices stressing form over content. I do know that the easiest and the first choices were the stories to which I had a physical response. I read Jennifer Egan's "Out of Body" clenched from head to toe by tension as her suicidal, drug-addled protagonist moves through the Manhattan night toward an unforgivable betrayal. I shed tears over two stories of childhood shadowed by unbearable memory: "The Hare's Mask," by Mark Slouka, with its piercing ending, and Claire Keegan's Irishinflected tale of neglect and rescue, "Foster." Elizabeth McCracken's "Property" also moved me, with its sudden perception shift along the wavering sightlines of loss and grief. Nathan Englander's "Free Fruit for Young Widows" opened with a gasp-inducing act of unexpected violence and evolved into an ethical Rubik's cube. A couple of stories made me laugh: Tom Bissell's "A Bridge Under Water," even as it foreshadows the dissolution of a marriage and probes what religion does for us, and to us; and Richard Powers's "To the Measures Fall," a deftly comic meditation on the uses of literature in the course of a life, and a lifetime. Some stories didn't call forth such a strong immediate response but had instead a lingering resonance. Of these, many dealt with love and its costs, leaving behind indelible images. In Megan Mayhew Bergman's "Housewifely Arts," a bereaved daughter drives miles to visit her dead mother's parrot because she yearns to hear the bird mimic her mother's voice. In Allegra Goodman's "La Vita Nuova," a jilted fiancée lets her art class paint all over her wedding dress. In Ehud Havazelet's spare and tender story, "Gurov in Manhattan," an ailing man and his aging dog must confront life's necessary losses. A complicated, only partly welcome romance blossoms between a Korean woman and her demented

Unfortunately, it coincided with another type of revolution—the French one—and for this one Lavoisier was entirely on the wrong side. Not only was he a member of the hated Ferme Générale, but he had enthusiastically built the wall that enclosed Paris—an edifice so loathed that it was the first thing attacked by the rebellious citizens. Capitalizing on this, in 1791 Marat, now a leading voice in the National Assembly, denounced Lavoisier and suggested that it was well past time for his hanging. Soon afterward the Ferme Générale was shut down. Not long after this Marat was murdered in his bath by an aggrieved young woman named Charlotte Corday, but by this time it was too late for Lavoisier. In

Crimea may have been a senseless war, but it rearranged Europe’s balance of power. Nicholas died in 1855, reputedly of shame over Crimea, to be succeeded by Alexander II (1855–81), a comparative liberal who conceded the final abolition of serfdom. This coincided with an outburst of Russian creativity, as if defeat had induced Russia to join Europe’s cultural community. Tolstoy fought at Crimea and brought the vastness of Russia into the drawing rooms of Europe. Dostoevsky brought its moral complexities. Russian composers such as Tchaikovsky, Mussorgski and Borodin and, soon after, the dramatist Chekhov were among Europe’s most inventive and popular artists. Alexander’s Moscow did not become a second Rome, but St Petersburg (Russia’s capital from 1712 to 1918) became a second Paris.

Maybe it’s not a coincidence that I’ve always been interested in heroes, starting with my dad, Phil Robertson, and my mom, Miss Kay. My other heroes are my pa and my granny, who taught me how to play cards and dominoes and everything about fishing (which was a lot), and my three older brothers, who teased me, beat me up, and sometimes let me follow them around. Not much has changed in that department. I’ve always loved movies, and when I was about seven or eight years old, I watched Rocky, Sylvester Stallone’s movie about an underdog boxer who used his fists, along with sheer will, determination, and the ability to endure pain, to make a way for himself. He fought hard but played fair and had a soft spot for his friends. I fell in love with Rocky. He was my hero, and I became obsessed. When I decide to do something, I’m all in; so I found a pair of red shorts that looked like Rocky’s boxing trunks and a navy blue bathrobe with two white stripes on the sleeve and no belt. I took off my shirt and ran around bare-chested in my robe and shorts. Most kids I knew went through a superhero phase, but they picked DC Comics guys, like Batman or Superman. Not me. I was Rocky Balboa, the Italian Stallion, and proud of it. Mom let me run around like that for a couple of years, even when we went in to town. Rocky had a girlfriend, Adrian, who was always there, always by his side. When he was beaten and blinded in a bad fight, he called out for her before anybody else. “Yo, Adrian!” he shouted in his Philly-Italian accent. He needed her. Eventually, I grew up, and the red shorts and blue bathrobe didn’t fit anymore, but I always remembered Rocky’s kindness and his courage. And that every Rocky needs an Adrian.

Leyel had buried himself within the marriage, helping and serving and loving Deet with all his heart. She was wrong, completely wrong about his coming to Trantor. He hadn't come as a sacrifice, againt his will, solely because she wanted to come. On the contrary: because she wanted so much to come, he also wanted to come, changing even his desires to coincide with hers. She commanded his very heart, because it was impossible for him not to desire anything that would bring her happiness. But she, no, she could not do that for him. If she went to Terminus, it would be as a noble sacrifice. She wold never let him forget that she hadn't wanted to. To him, their marriage was his very soul. To Deet, their marriage was just a friendship with sex. Her soul belonged as much to these other women as to him. By dividing her loyalties, she fragmented them; none were strong enough to sway her deepest desires. Thus he discovered what he supposed all faithful men eventually discover--that no human relationship is ever anything but tentative. There is no such thing as an unbreakable bond between people. Like the particles in the nucleus of the atom. They are bound by the strongest forces in the universe, and yet they can be shattered, they can break. Nothing can last. Nothing is, finally, waht it once seemed to be. Deet and he had had a perfect marriage until there came a stress that exposed its imperfection. Anyonewho thinks he has a perfect marriage, a perfect friendship, a perfect trust of any kind, he only believes this becasue the stress that will break it has not yet come. He might die with the illusion of happiness, but all he has proven is that sometimes death comes before betrayal. If you live long enough, betrayal will inevitably come.

It was the ultimate sacrilege that Jesus Christ, the very Son of God, was rejected and even put to death. And it continues. In many parts of the world today we see a growing rejection of the Son of God. His divinity is questioned. His gospel is deemed irrelevant. In day-to-day life, His teachings are ignored. Those who legitimately speak in His name find little respect in secular society. If we ignore the Lord and His servants, we may just as well be atheists—the end result is practically the same. It is what Mormon described as typical after extended periods of peace and prosperity: “Then is the time that they do harden their hearts, and do forget the Lord their God, and do trample under their feet the Holy One” (Helaman 12:2). And so we should ask ourselves, do we reverence the Holy One and those He has sent? Some years before he was called as an Apostle himself, Elder Robert D. Hales recounted an experience that demonstrated his father’s sense of that holy calling. Elder Hales said: "Some years ago Father, then over eighty years of age, was expecting a visit from a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles on a snowy winter day. Father, an artist, had painted a picture of the home of the Apostle. Rather than have the painting delivered to him, this sweet Apostle wanted to go personally to pick the painting up and thank my father for it. Knowing that Father would be concerned that everything was in readiness for the forthcoming visit, I dropped by his home. Because of the depth of the snow, snowplows had caused a snowbank in front of the walkway to the front door. Father had shoveled the walks and then labored to remove the snowbank. He returned to the house exhausted and in pain. When I arrived, he was experiencing heart pain from overexertion and stressful anxiety. My first concern was to warn him of his unwise physical efforts. Didn’t he know what the result of his labor would be? "'Robert,' he said through interrupted short breaths, 'do you realize an Apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ is coming to my home? The walks must be clean. He should not have to come through a snowdrift.' He raised his hand, saying, 'Oh, Robert, don’t ever forget or take for granted the privilege it is to know and to serve with Apostles of the Lord.'" [In CR, April 1992, 89; or “Gratitude for the Goodness of God,” Ensign, May 1992, 64] I think it is more than coincidence that such a father would be blessed to have a son serve as an Apostle. You might ask yourself, “Do I see the calling of the prophets and apostles as sacred? Do I treat their counsel seriously, or is it a light thing with me?” President Gordon B. Hinckley, for instance, has counseled us to pursue education and vocational training; to avoid pornography as a plague; to respect women; to eliminate consumer debt; to be grateful, smart, clean, true, humble, and prayerful; and to do our best, our very best. Do your actions show that you want to know and do what he teaches? Do you actively study his words and the statements of the Brethren? Is this something you hunger and thirst for? If so, you have a sense of the sacredness of the calling of prophets as the witnesses and messengers of the Son of God.

The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common among Englishmen and Americans today. It is not every truth that recommends itself to the common sense. Nature has a place for the wild Clematis as well as for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth are reminiscent—others merely SENSIBLE, as the phrase is,—others prophetic. Some forms of disease, even, may prophesy forms of health. The geologist has discovered that the figures of serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have their prototypes in the forms of fossil species which were extinct before man was created, and hence "indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of organic existence." The Hindus dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent; and though it may be an unimportant coincidence, it will not be out of place here to state, that a fossil tortoise has lately been discovered in Asia large enough to support an elephant. I confess that I am partial to these wild fancies, which transcend the order of time and development. They are the sublimest recreation of the intellect. The partridge loves peas, but not those that go with her into the pot. In short, all good things are wild and free.

The α7 receptor, however, stood out from the crowd because of its special relationship with nicotine. No one experiences this more vividly than habitual smokers: Nicotine has a way of turbocharging the effects of the acetylcholine that this receptor needs in order to function, and smokers—or the α7 receptors in their brains—like it when their acetylcholine is turbocharged. This is the feeling cigarettes can give smokers—that way nicotine has of focusing their minds for short periods, or calming them. Could it just be a coincidence, Freedman wondered, that many schizophrenia patients—Peter Galvin among them—can’t get enough cigarettes? For very brief moments, nicotine may offer them at least some relief from their delusions. If Freedman could amplify that effect—mimic it in a lab, bottle it, and send it out to everyone diagnosed with schizophrenia—could it treat the symptoms of the illness more effectively and less harmfully than Thorazine? First, he needed more proof. In 1997, Freedman devised an experiment: He gave nicotine to people with schizophrenia, usually many pieces of Nicorette chewing gum, and then measured their brain waves with his double-click test. Sure enough, people with schizophrenia who chewed three pieces of Nicorette passed the test with flying colors. They responded to the first sound and didn’t respond to the second, just like people without schizophrenia. The effects didn’t last after the nicotine wore off, but Freedman still was stunned.

In my experience, those who make the most theatrical display of demanding 'proof' of God are also those least willing to undertake the specific kinds of mental and spiritual discipline that all the great religious traditions say are required to find God. If one is left unsatisfied by the logical arguments for belief in God, and instead insists upon some 'experimental' or 'empirical' demonstration, then one ought to be willing to attempt the sort of investigations necessary to achieve any sort of real certainty regarding a reality that is nothing less than the infinite coincidence of absolute being, consciousness, and bliss. In short, one must pray: not fitfully, not simply in the manner of a suppliant seeking aid or of a penitent seeking absolution but also according to the disciplines of infused contemplation, with real constancy of will and a patient openness to grace, suffering states of both dereliction and ecstasy with the equanimity of faith, hoping but not presuming, so as to find whether the spiritual journey, when followed in earnest, can disclose its own truthfulness and conduct one into communion with a dimension of reality beyond the ontological indigence of the physical. No one is obliged to make such an effort; but, unless one does, any demands one might make for evidence of the reality of God can safely be dismissed as disingenuous, and any arguments against belief in God that one might have the temerity to make to others can safely be ignored as vacuous.

If man had wings, he would have polluted the sky. Houston we have a problem. The era when scientific progress seemed unstoppable has stopped today, showing the weaknesses of governments and peoples to the whole world in the face of any virus. Fifty years ago the question that afflicted some "powerful" states, concerned the ability to reach the mysterious space, an undertaking that, given the age, seemed increasingly difficult. Today, however, the biggest mission the world is facing is to survive, trying to make people holed up in their homes. But where is the meaning of all this? How did we go from the time when everything was possible and the economy seemed unstoppable, to that in which there are no ways to produce simple masks in a short time? Why did we spend almost a century trying to reach the Moon, Mars and the whole Universe, rather than taking care of our fellow men and our planet that collapsed towards extinction minute by minute? It is certainly no coincidence that while the world is facing a Covid-19 pandemic, NASA is committed to managing the upcoming "Mars 2020" mission with launch scheduled for 17 July 2020. The main objective of this new mission it to look for traces of possible Martian microbes and collect soil samples. You would agree with me in affirming that the sense of the space mission, nowadays, could look more like a demonstration of man's superiority over nature and towards the unknown, than a journey to get to know and understand the infinite mysteries of space and its planets? There is something within our world that pushes us to never appreciate what we have, to want more and more, to the point where we begin to sacrifice the most important and indispensable things, in order to reach questionable new horizons. In this way, governments prefer to invest in weapons rather than in health, in multinationals, rather than supporting education, in space missions rather than taking care of our environment, making the world unprepared for an emergency like a pandemic. And here we are, while fifty years ago we were with our eyes glued to a screen and our breath suspended in order to become witnesses of the Apollo 13 mission, today we stare at our televisions while we see the hundreds of thousands in the mouth of death that our world has to spare them. And so, while we have to deal with our indifference and our mistakes, Mother Nature, who for centuries and centuries has been disfigured of all beauty, today comes back to life, showing herself more alive than ever. Nature is regaining its footing and repopulating lands and seas, cities are less polluted and finally you can breathe clean air. Once again, our planet shows us how powerful it is and how it can put man in his place in a few moments. So, for the umpteenth time we are forced to face the fate that we built with indifference and arrogance, forgetting about our eternal vulnerability. Yes Houston, we still have a problem. It's called "human ignorance" disguised as a philosophy of futility.

MY DEAR MISS BROOKE,—I have your guardian's permission to address you on a subject than which I have none more at heart. I am not, I trust, mistaken in the recognition of some deeper correspondence than that of date in the fact that a consciousness of need in my own life had arisen contemporaneously with the possibility of my becoming acquainted with you. For in the first hour of meeting you, I had an impression of your eminent and perhaps exclusive fitness to supply that need (connected, I may say, with such activity of the affections as even the preoccupations of a work too special to be abdicated could not uninterruptedly dissimulate); and each succeeding opportunity for observation has given the impression an added depth by convincing me more emphatically of that fitness which I had preconceived, and thus evoking more decisively those affections to which I have but now referred. Our conversations have, I think, made sufficiently clear to you the tenor of my life and purposes: a tenor unsuited, I am aware, to the commoner order of minds. But I have discerned in you an elevation of thought and a capability of devotedness, which I had hitherto not conceived to be compatible either with the early bloom of youth or with those graces of sex that may be said at once to win and to confer distinction when combined, as they notably are in you, with the mental qualities above indicated. It was, I confess, beyond my hope to meet with this rare combination of elements both solid and attractive, adapted to supply aid in graver labors and to cast a charm over vacant hours; and but for the event of my introduction to you (which, let me again say, I trust not to be superficially coincident with foreshadowing needs, but providentially related thereto as stages towards the completion of a life's plan), I should presumably have gone on to the last without any attempt to lighten my solitariness by a matrimonial union. Such, my dear Miss Brooke, is the accurate statement of my feelings; and I rely on your kind indulgence in venturing now to ask you how far your own are of a nature to confirm my happy presentiment. To be accepted by you as your husband and the earthly guardian of your welfare, I should regard as the highest of providential gifts. In return I can at least offer you an affection hitherto unwasted, and the faithful consecration of a life which, however short in the sequel, has no backward pages whereon, if you choose to turn them, you will find records such as might justly cause you either bitterness or shame. I await the expression of your sentiments with an anxiety which it would be the part of wisdom (were it possible) to divert by a more arduous labor than usual. But in this order of experience I am still young, and in looking forward to an unfavorable possibility I cannot but feel that resignation to solitude will be more difficult after the temporary illumination of hope. In any case, I shall remain,     Yours with sincere devotion,      EDWARD CASAUBON

He had a rough idea where he was going, since Rylann had previously mentioned that she lived in Roscoe Village. At the stoplight at Belmont Avenue, he pulled out his cell phone and scrolled through his contacts. The beauty of text messaging, he realized, was in its simplicity. He didn’t have to try to explain things, nor did he have to attempt to parse through all the banter in an attempt to figure out what she might be thinking. Instead, he could keep things short and sweet. I’D LIKE TO SEE YOU. He hit send. To kill time while he waited for her response, he drove in the direction of his sister’s wine shop, figuring he could always drop in and harass Jordan about something. This time, however, she beat him to the punch. “So who’s the brunette bombshell?” Jordan asked as soon as he walked into the shop and took a seat at the main bar. Damn. He’d forgotten about the stupid Scene and Heard column. Kyle helped himself to a cracker and some Brie cheese sitting on the bar. “I’m going to say…Angelina Jolie. Actually, no—Megan Fox.” “Megan Fox is, like, twenty-five.” “And this is a problem why, exactly?” Jordan slapped his hand as he reached for more crackers. “Those are for customers.” She put her hand on her hip. “You know, after reading the Scene and Heard column, I’d kind of hoped it was Rylann they were talking about. And that maybe, just maybe, my ne’er-do-well twin had decided to stop playing around and finally pursue a woman of quality.” He stole another cracker. “Now, that would be something.” She shook her head. “Why do I bother? You know, one day you’re going to wake up and…” Kyle’s cell phone buzzed, and he tuned out the rest of Jordan’s lecture—he could probably repeat the whole thing word for word by now—as he checked the incoming message. It was from Rylann, her response as short and sweet as his original text. 3418 CORNELIA, #3. He had her address. With a smile, he looked up and interrupted his sister. “That’s great, Jordo. Hey, by any chance do you have any bottles of that India Ink cabernet lying around?” She stopped midrant and stared at him. “I’m sure I do. Why, what made you think of that?” Then her face broke into a wide grin. “Wait a second…that was the wine Rylann talked about when she was here. She said it was one of her favorites.” “Did she? Funny coincidence.” Jordan put her hand over her heart. “Oh my God, you’re trying to impress her. That is so cute.” “Don’t be ridiculous,” Kyle scoffed. “I just thought, since I’ve heard such good things about the wine, that I would give it a shot.” Jordan gave him a look, cutting through all the bullshit. “Kyle. She’s going to love it.” Okay, whatever. Maybe he was trying to impress Rylann a little. “You don’t think it’s too much? Like I’m trying too hard?” Jordan put her hand over her heart again. “Oh. It’s like watching Bambi take his first steps.” “Jordo…” he growled warningly. With a smile, she put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed affectionately. “It’s perfect. Trust me.

Blessed Man” is a tribute to Updike’s tenacious maternal grandmother, Katherine Hoyer, who died in 1955. Inspired by an heirloom, a silver thimble engraved with her initials, a keepsake Katherine gave to John and Mary as a wedding present (their best present, he told his mother), the story is an explicit attempt to bring her back to life (“O Lord, bless these poor paragraphs, that would do in their vile ignorance Your work of resurrection”), and a meditation on the extent to which it’s possible to recapture experience and preserve it through writing. The death of his grandparents diminished his family by two fifths and deprived him of a treasured part of his past, the sheltered years of his youth and childhood. Could he make his grandmother live again on the page? It’s certainly one of his finest prose portraits, tender, clear-eyed, wonderfully vivid. At one point the narrator remembers how, as a high-spirited teenager, he would scoop up his tiny grandmother, “lift her like a child, crooking one arm under her knees and cupping the other behind her back. Exultant in my height, my strength, I would lift that frail brittle body weighing perhaps a hundred pounds and twirl with it in my arms while the rest of the family watched with startled smiles of alarm.” When he adds, “I was giving my past a dance,” we hear the voice of John Updike exulting in his strength. Katherine takes center stage only after an account of the dramatic day of her husband’s death. John Hoyer died a few months after John and Mary were married, on the day both the newlyweds and Mary’s parents were due to arrive in Plowville. From this unfortunate coincidence, the Updike family managed to spin a pair of short stories. Six months before he wrote “Blessed Man,” Updike’s mother had her first story accepted by The New Yorker. For years her son had been doing his filial best to help get her work published—with no success. In college he sent out the manuscript of her novel about Ponce de León to the major Boston publishers, and when he landed at The New Yorker he made sure her stories were read by editors instead of languishing in the slush pile. These efforts finally bore fruit when an editor at the magazine named Rachel MacKenzie championed “Translation,” a portentous family saga featuring Linda’s version of her father’s demise. Maxwell assured Updike that his colleagues all thought his mother “immensely gifted”; if that sounds like tactful exaggeration, Maxwell’s idea that he could detect “the same quality of mind running through” mother and son is curious to say the least. Published in The New Yorker on March 11, 1961, “Translation” was signed Linda Grace Hoyer and narrated by a character named Linda—but it wasn’t likely to be mistaken for a memoir. The story is overstuffed with biblical allusion, psychodrama, and magical thinking, most of it Linda’s. She believes that her ninety-year-old father plans to be translated directly to heaven, ascending like Elijah in a whirlwind, with chariots of fire, and to pass his mantle to a new generation, again like Elijah. It’s not clear whether this grand design is his obsession, as she claims, or hers. As it happens, the whirlwind is only a tussle with his wife that lands the old folks on the floor beside the bed. Linda finds them there and says, “Of all things. . . . What are you two doing?” Her father answers, his voice “matter-of-fact and conversational”: “We are sitting on the floor.” Having spoken these words, he dies. Linda’s son Eric (a writer, of course) arrives on the scene almost immediately. When she tells him, “Grampy died,” he replies, “I know, Mother, I know. It happened as we turned off the turnpike. I felt

As the most perfect subject for painting I have already specified inwardly satisfied [reconciled and peaceful] love, the object of which is not a purely spiritual ‘beyond’ but is present, so that we can see love itself before us in what is loved. The supreme and unique form of this love is Mary’s love for the Christ-child, the love of the one mother who has borne the Saviour of the world and carries him in her arms. This is the most beautiful subject to which Christian art in general, and especially painting in its religious sphere, has risen. The love of God, and in particular the love of Christ who sits at’ the right hand of God, is of a purely spiritual kind. The object of this love is visible only to the eye of the soul, so that here there is strictly no question of that duality which love implies, nor is any natural bond established between the lovers or any linking them together from the start. On the other hand, any other love is accidental in the inclination of one lover for another, or,’ alternatively, the lovers, e.g. brothers and sisters or a father in his love for his children, have outside this relation other conceI1l8 with an essential claim on them. Fathers or brothers have to apply themselves to the world, to the state, business, war, or, in short, to general purposes, while sisters become wives, mothers, and so forth. But in the case of maternal love it is generally true that a mother’s love for her child is neither something accidental just a single feature in her life, but, on the contrary, it is her supreme vocation on earth, and her natural character and most sacred calling directly coincide. But while other loving mothers see and feel in their child their husband and their inmost union with him, in Mary’s relation to her child this aspect is always absent. For her feeling has nothing in common with a wife’s love for her husband; on the contrary, her relation to Joseph is more like a sister’s to a brother, while on Joseph’s side there is a secret awe of the child who is God’s and Mary’s. Thus religious love in its fullest and most intimate human form we contemplate not in the suffering and risen Christ or in his lingering amongst his friends but in the person of Mary with her womanly feeling. Her whole heart and being is human love for the child that she calls her own, and at the same time adoration, worship, and love of God with whom she feels herself at one. She is humble in God’s sight and yet has an infinite sense of being the one woman who is blessed above all other virgins. She is not self-subsistent on her own account, but is perfect only in her child, in God, but in him she is satisfied and blessed, whether. at the manger or as the Queen of Heaven, without passion or longing, without any further need, without any aim other than to have and to hold what she has. In its religious subject-matter the portrayal of this love has a wide series of events, including, for example, the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Birth, the Flight into Egypt, etc. And then there are, added to this, other subjects from the later life of Christ, i.e. the Disciples and the women who follow him and in whom the love of God becomes more or less a personal relation of love for a living and present Saviour who walks amongst them as an actual man; there is also the love of the angels who hover over the birth of Christ and many other scenes in his life, in serious worship or innocent joy. In all these subjects it is painting especially which presents the peace and full satisfaction of love. But nevertheless this peace is followed by the deepest suffering. Mary sees Christ carry his cross, she sees him suffer and die on the cross, taken down from the cross and buried, and no grief of others is so profound as hers. Mary’s grief is of a totally different kind. She is emotional, she feels the thrust of the dagger into the centre of her soul, her heart breaks, but she does not turn into stone.

the word desirable. Of course, we learn later just how seductive that can be. Early rabbinic literature showed a sexual connotation to chamed as chamdam, using it as a reference to a lustful person. Chimmud is even blunter as a reference to a sexual appetite. As a verb chamed means to be excited or hot. Hebrew Jewish grammarian David Kimhi (Radak) states that it is no coincidence that the word cham (hot), makes up two thirds of the root. He points out that lechem chamudot is taken by some to mean fresh, hot tasty bread. So what I am drawing from this? Is Solomon’s beloved saying she is sitting under the apple tree with one hot number? Well, there is much more to my research on this verse that I cannot put into a short study, so I am leaving open a number of gaps, but let me just share my conclusion on Song of Solomon 2:3. The young lover is making a very distinct play on the word chamed by bringing it into association with the apple tree among the trees of the woods. This is a direct reference to the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden. She sits under her beloved’s shadow with covertness or chamed eating this forbidden fruit. You see the word chamed ultimately has the idea of intimacy or totally possessing and consuming something. This fruit is not forbidden so long as she consumes it within the bounds of intimacy born out of love with her beloved. Just as a sexual relationship is forbidden outside

Oh, yes," Father Mancuso nodded. "As Father Ryan mentioned, I've seen and heard many who've come to me as a psychotherapist and as a parish priest." Chancellor Ryan picked up the thread. "Then there are the so-called extraordinary activities of the devil in the world. Usually these are material things around a person that are affected; that might be what you're up against. We call it infestation. It breaks down into different categories which we'll explain in a minute." "Obsession," Father Nuncio put in, "is the next step, in which the person is affected either internally or externally. And finally there is possession, by which the person temporarily loses control of his faculties and the devil acts in and through him." When Father Mancuso had come to the Chancellors' office to keep his appointment, he had been somewhat embarrassed as to how to approach his problem. But he relaxed as the two priests had shown keen interest. Now with their spelling out the guidelines he must take in this kind of situation, Father Mancuso raised his hopes for deliverance from this evil. "In investigating cases of possible diabolical interference," Chancellor Ryan went on, "we must consider the following: One, fraud and deception. Two, natural scientific causes. Three, parapsychological causes. Four, diabolical influences. And five, miracles. In this case, fraud and trickery don't seem plausible. George and Kathleen Lutz seem to be normal, balanced individuals. We think you are too. The possibilities therefore are reduced to psychological, parapsychological, or diabolical influences." "We'll exclude the miraculous," Father Nuncio broke in, "because the Divine would not involve itself in the trivial and foolish." "True," said Father Ryan. "Therefore the explanation would seem to include hallucination and autosuggestion - you know, like the invisible touches Kathy experienced - and when George thought he heard that marching band. But let's take the parapsychological line. Parapsychologists like Dr. Rhine, who works at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, define four main operations in the science. The first three come under the general heading of ESP-extrasensory perception. They are mental telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition, which could explain George's visions and 'picking up' information that seems to coincide with known facts about the DeFeos. The fourth parapsychological area is psychokinesis, where objects move by themselves. That would be the case with the Lutzes' ceramic lion - if it did move," he added. Father Nuncio got up to refill his cup. "All of what we've said, Frank, is part of the suggestion we have for the Lutzes. Have them contact some investigative organization like Dr. Rhine's to come in and look at the house. They'll do extensive testing and I'm sure they can come to some conclusion short of diabolical influence.

Finally, the Industrial Revolution coincided with a transformation of science from a pleasant but nonessential branch of philosophy into a vibrant profession that helped people make money. Many heroes of the early Industrial Revolution were chemists and engineers, often amateurs such as Michael Faraday and James Watt who lacked formal degrees or academic appointments. Like many young Victorians excited by the winds of change, Charles Darwin and his elder brother Erasmus dreamed as boys of becoming chemists.8 Other fields of science, such as biology and medicine, also made profound contributions to the Industrial Revolution, often by promoting public health. Louis Pasteur began his career as a chemist working on the structure of tartaric acid, which was used in wine production. But in the process of studying fermentation he discovered microbes, invented methods to sterilize food, and created the first vaccines. Without Pasteur and other pioneers in microbiology and public health, the Industrial Revolution would not have progressed so far and so fast. In short, the Industrial Revolution was actually a combination of technological, economic, scientific, and social transformations that rapidly and radically altered the course of history and reconfigured the face of the planet in less than ten generations—a true blink of an eye by the standards of evolutionary time. Over

The urge to impose a single classification on SF ignores the generic hybridity of many novels: incorporation of the Gothic in The Island of Dr Moreau, of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in Forbidden Planet, and so on. The rise of film coincides with the emergence of science fiction. The relation between SF fiction and film has included an ongoing fascination with spectacle and extraordinary special effects like those pioneered in Georges Melies’s A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904).

In January 1993, writer John Connolly cast suspicion on the relationship between Bill Hamilton and Robert Booth Nichols: “... despite Hamilton’s reservations about Nichols’ character, the man who designed a program for tracking criminals and the man who has been linked by the FBI to two crime organizations communicate with surprising frequency. Last summer I visited Hamilton’s office in Washington to get a copy of the phone records that would show his call to Nichols on August 9, 1991. He seemed reluctant. It took a fair amount of persuasion to convince him to turn it over—and what he gave me was a photocopy with all but that call blocked out. Shortly after leaving, I remembered that I had wanted to ask him something else and returned to his office. While I was waiting in the reception area, the phone rang. The receptionist buzzed Hamilton: ‘Robert Booth Nichols, returning your call.’ When I asked Hamilton about the call, he replied, ‘I call Nichols all the time. It was just a coincidence that it was right after you left.”’ (Connolly, John, “Dead Right,” Spy, January 1993.)

Reflection does not coincide with what is constituted but grasps only the essence of it...it does not take the place of inten tional life in an act of pure production but only reproduces the outline of it. Husserl always presents the "return to absolute consciousness" as a title for a multitude of operations which are learned, gradually effected, and never completed. We are never wholly one with constitutive genesis; we barely manage to accompany it for short segments. What is it then which responds to our reconstitution from (if these words have a meaning ) the other side of things? From our own side, there is nothing but convergent but discontinuous intentions, moments of clarity. We constitute constituting consciousness by dint of rare and difficult efforts. It is the presumptive or alleged subject of our attempts. The author, Valery said, is the instantaneous thinker of works which were slow and laborious—and this thinker is nowhere. As the author is for VaIery the impostor of the writer, constituting consciousness is the philosopher's professional impostor. In any case, for Husserl it is the artifact the teleology of intentional life ends up at—and not the Spinozist attribute of Thought. Originally a project to gain intellectual possession of the world, constitution becomes increasingly, as Husserl's thought matures, a means of unveiling a back side of things that we have not constituted. This senseless effort to submit everything to the proprieties of "consciousness" (to the limpid play of its attitudes, intentions, and impositions of meaning) was necessary—the picture of a well-behaved World left to us by classical philosophy had to be pushed to the limit--in order to reveal all that was left over: these beings beneath our idealizations and objectifications which secretly nourish them and in which we have difficulty recognizing noema... Willy-nilly, against his plans and according to his essential audacity, Husserl awakens a wild-flowering world and mind. Things are no longer there simply according to their projective appearances and the requirements of the panorama, as in Renaissance perspective; but on the contrary upright, insistent, flaying our glance with their edges, each thing claiming an absolute presence which is not compossible with the absolute presence of other things, and which they nevertheless have all together by virtue of a configurational meaning which is in no way indicated by its 'theoretical meaning.

know anything about Minister Zhao’s murder, apart from the fact that it happened. But two murders in such a short period of time? Coincidence, or could they be linked? Ya Yu has an interest in this peace treaty – Mei Feng’s here, and I think she’s the Queen’s most trusted servant.’ Irene thought about the timing of her recent mission, rescuing another Librarian who’d been dragged into a contest for power in the dragon courts. ‘And Ya Yu was very eager to fill the assassinated Minister Zhao’s post before this peace conference took place. Is it possible that the minister’s death was also someone’s attempt

As of February 8, 1979, James Arthur Springer—Jim, as he went by—had been twice married. His first marriage, to a woman named Linda, ended in divorce. His second wife was named Betty. Jim Springer grew up in Ohio and once owned a dog named Toy. He had a son named James Allan (although perhaps with one L). He was a chain-smoker who liked beer. In his garage he had a woodworking bench. He drove a Chevy, suffered from high blood pressure and migraines, and once served as a sheriff’s deputy. His family lived on a quiet street—theirs was the only house on the block. As of February 8, 1979, James Edward Lewis—Jim, as he went by—had been twice married. His first marriage, to a woman named Linda, ended in divorce. His second wife was named Betty. Jim Lewis grew up in Ohio and once owned a dog named Toy. He had a son named James Allan (although perhaps with one L). He was a chain-smoker who liked beer. In his garage he had a woodworking bench. He drove a Chevy, suffered from high blood pressure and migraines, and once served as a sheriff’s deputy. His family lived on a quiet street—theirs was the only house on the block. As of February 8, 1979, Jim Springer and Jim Lewis had almost no knowledge of one another. They had met before, but only as infants. On February 9, 1979, the two met for the first time in nearly forty years. They were identical twins, given up for adoption as one-month-olds, now reunited. The shocking coincidence seems like that of myth, but it’s almost certainly not—shortly after the twins’ reunion, People magazine and Smithsonian magazine reported on the incredible confluence of genetically identical twins with anecdotally identical lives. The two men piqued the curiosity of a researcher named Thomas J. Bouchard, a professor of psychology and the director of the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research at the University of Minnesota.

What a coincidence it was for me to see the SS African Moon in Dar-es-Salaam! After leaving Farrell Lines I thought that I would never get back to Kenya but here I was. It was just like home coming when I came aboard and saw Eddie the first mate. Everything was just as I left it three years before so as we celebrated our reunion over a cup of coffee. Although I hadn’t planned it, I suddenly got an idea. This would be a once in a lifetime opportunity to bring something worthwhile back to The United States. So, I asked Eddie if he could bring something big back to New York for me. “What might that be” he asked suspecting that I was up to no good. “No, it’s not narcotics, it’s a dug out native canoe.” I replied. “Well, I won’t have room in any of the holds but we can lash it down on deck. “Good I’ll have it to you within an hour!” I left and found someone who was willing to sell his dug-out to me and deliver it to the Meteor for under fifty dollars, which at the time was a lot of money but the price included the delivery charge. My, newly acquired well used dug out canoe, was the last thing that crossed the fish plates of the African Moon. Talking to Eddie we watched as the crew professionally lashed it down just forward of the #1 hatch. Shortly thereafter the African Moon backed down and headed out into the Indian Ocean. As for the rest of the story… When the Moon returned, I picked up the dug-out dockside in Brooklyn. With a little help I got it into my pick-up and brought it to my father’s house in Jersey City.  Later without my knowing, it he drilled holes into its hull and decided that it would make a good planter. It didn’t take long for the dirt in it to cause the rot to set in. Within months my canoe was destroyed, however I still have the paddles which sadly but reminiscently serve as a decoration in my Florida home.

The Ekarv method, named after Margareta Ekarv of the Swedish Postal Museum, is a proven set of guidelines, the effectiveness of which has been substantiated by research and has been widely adopted. 1. Use simple language to express complex ideas. 2. Use normal spoken word order. 3. One main idea per line, the end of the line coinciding with the natural end of the phrase. "The robbers were sentenced to death by hanging" is short and to the point. 4. Lines of about 45 letters; text broken into short paragraphs of four or five lines. 5. Use the active form of verbs and state the subject early in the sentence. 6. Avoid: subordinate clauses, complicated constructions, unnecessary adverbs, hyphenating words and the end of lines. 7. Read texts aloud and note natural pauses. 8. Adjust wording and punctuation to reflect the rhythm of speech. 9. Discuss texts with colleagues and consider their comments. 10. Pin draft texts in their final positions to assess affect. 11. Continually reverse and refine the wording. 12. Concentrate the meaning to an "almost poetic level".

You are not leaving.” “I will not argue the matter with you when Winnie can walk into the kitchen at any minute.” “Fair enough, but you will listen to what I say, Emmie Farnum. You are too damned skinny, you aren’t getting enough rest, your temper is short, and I don’t care if your menses are going to start this afternoon, you have no call to be treating me like I’m your enemy.” “Do not,” she hissed, “mention my bodily functions outside of a locked bedroom door.” St. Just ran a hand through his hair in exasperation. “I want to help, all right? All I’m saying is you seem frazzled, and if Winnie is part of the problem, I’ll tackle that, but we need to find a way to talk that doesn’t leave us at daggers drawn.” His tone was reasonable, almost pleading, and when he saw her shoulders relax, he knew he was making some progress—not much, but some. “If you would keep Winnie occupied today, I’d appreciate it.” “Done. And when you are through here, please just take a nap, Em.” He glanced around the kitchen. “Leave the mess. I’ve got staff, and they can clean up for once. Don’t come down to dinner if you don’t want to, either. Val understands—he plays his piano for hours most days, and if we see him at meals, it’s a coincidence. Just…” He looked her up and down, trying to keep the worry from his expression. “Just get some rest,” he finished with a tentative smile. “Please?” She nodded, able to return a small smile of her own. Taking his chances, St. Just stepped over to her, brushed a kiss to her forehead, and took his leave. He was more alarmed that she merely bore the kiss silently rather than swat him again with her towel. He

You silly," said Abdul, "those clouds don' mean nothing. I see'd them plenty a'ready. It was jus' coincidence that they was in the sky before Koos an" Piet was drowned." "Yes," said Kielbiet, "it's nonsense. Have a drink. You'll go fish all right.

We begin to realize that, once these issues are raised, it doesn't really matter whether a man "believes in God" or not. "God," after all, is just a short-hand symbol for our attitude toward the nature of the universe.

He concluded that coincidence represents an acausal principle in nature, as distinguished from the causal principles science had hitherto studied. He compared the acausal coincidental principle (ACOP, we shall call it for short) with gravity, noting that gravity acts on mass, while ACOP acts on form and function. He concluded, in words that foreshadowed some current speculations in quantum physics, "We thus arrive at the image of a world- mosaic . . . which, in spite of constant shufflings and rearrangements, also takes care of bringing like and like together.

Women discharge roughly 35 percent of sperm within 30 minutes of the time of insemination, averaged across all instances of intercourse. If the woman has an orgasm, however, she retains 70 percent of the sperm, ejecting only 30 percent. This 5 percent difference is not large, but if it occurred repeatedly, in woman after woman, generation after generation, it could add up to a large selection pressure over evolutionary time. Lack of an orgasm leads to the ejection of more sperm. This evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that a woman’s orgasm functions to draw the sperm from the vagina into the cervical canal and uterus, increasing the probability of conception (Puts et al., 2012). The number of sperm a woman retains is also linked with whether she is having an affair. Women time their adulterous liaisons in a way that is reproductively detrimental to their husbands. In a nationwide sex survey of 3,679 women in Britain, all women recorded their menstrual cycles as well as the timing of their copulations with their husbands and, if they were having affairs, with their lovers. It turned out that women having affairs time their copulations, most likely unconsciously, to coincide with the point in their menstrual cycle when they were most likely to be ovulating and hence were most likely to conceive (Baker & Bellis, 1995). Furthermore, women who are having affairs are more likely to be orgasmic with their affair partner than with their regular partner (Buss, 2016 b). Other studies find that women are especially likely to experience sexual orgasm with men who are masculine and physically attractive—qualities women typically desire in short-term mating (Puts, Welling, Burriss, & Dawood, 2012).

talent, in both cases, is greatest when it coincides with a taste for truth—which, in short, is comforting.

Economic difficulty coincides with a sense of cultural disadvantage. Work no longer provides identity and status for many young men. Given cultural pressure to consume conspicuously, and the linkage of consumer goods to sex appeal, poor young men feel left out. They resent governments that are more inclined to tackle discrimination on grounds of gender, race, or sexual orientation than they are to deal with class inequality—doubtless governments ignore class inequality because it alone is intrinsic to capitalism.

Some areas of opportunity: •   First, stop saying, “Well, this is just the way it is in our industry.” •   Have your available cash reported DAILY, with a short explanation of why it changed in the last 24 hours, and chart it against accounts receivable (AR) and accounts payable (AP) weekly. You’ll learn so much more about your business when you see how the cash is flowing on a daily basis. •   If you want to be paid sooner, ask. Small firms are finding that large companies (and governments!!) will pay considerably faster or even prepay if they simply ask, ask, ask, ask, and ask some more. •   Give value back to customers who pay on time or in advance. •   Get your invoices out more quickly. Hire one more person in accounting to do nothing but make sure invoicing is timely and follow up on payments. •   Send friendly reminders five days before the deadline that payments are due. Many customers are disorganized and will appreciate the reminders, resulting in faster payment. •   If invoices are recurring, obtain recurring credit card authorization from your customers to automate on-time payments. •   Understand why your clients are paying late. They might be unhappy with your product or service. Or perhaps an invoice has recurring mistakes, or it is not structured to flow through the customer’s automated invoicing system. •   Understand each customer’s payment cycles, and time your billings to coincide. •   Pay many of your own expenses with a credit card so you can play the float. Get your own customers to pay by credit card, so they can pay you quickly even if their cash flow is slow. •   Help your customers improve their cash flow so they can pay you on time. Offer them leasing options, for instance. •   Shorten cycles for delivery of your product or service. All of you have some kind of “work in progress.” The faster you complete projects, the faster you get paid. •   Offer a product or service so valuable that you have some leverage with your customers to get them to pay sooner. • Remember, improving margins and profit improves cash.

In short, what at first seems strangely coincidental quickly loses much of its uncanny grandeur, the “size of the impossible” when examined with a critical eye. But the fact that in the infinite universe there will be myriad coincidences that only seem impossible, or meaningful, from a certain point of view is no kind of argument that our commonsense understanding of causality is complete, or that there aren’t real “synchronicities.” Who are skeptics to say that people might not sometimes be right when they detect the operation in their own lives, or in history, of some principle that has not yet been given mainstream psychology’s stamp of legitimacy, such as premonitions of future events? We know our understanding of physical reality is not complete—physicists are clear on that—and we will see in Part Two that new advances at the intersection of physics and biology are radically revising our understanding of living systems too. Among other things, they raise the possibility that the brain may have properties that could even be time-defying. Given the certainty that science is not finished and that new revolutions await us, is it reasonable to insist that there are no undiscovered realms of human capacity awaiting to be catalogued and investigated?

The future has yet to be written, but plans upon plans have been laid out before us as we are driven like cattle down a very dangerous path. A path seemingly designed to cause us pain and suffering as we traverse it. A path we have only started moving through as it becomes steeper and steeper, with death potentially awaiting around every turn. The worldwide events we are witnessing today are not random coincidences of chance but coordinated efforts by those with the resources and power to upend our way of life by reducing our freedom and rights to a negligible idea that is best ignored. Are we being led to slaughter? Is that the future we will meet -our fate?

Keynes accepted the view he attributed to Burke that the aim of politics was not to bring about states of affairs ‘good intrinsically and in isolation’, but to facilitate the pursuit of ethical goods by members of the community by guaranteeing conditions of ‘physical calm, material comfort, and intellectual freedom’. Up to a point, the requirements of welfare and ethical goodness coincide. But Keynes never regarded politics as an arena for achieving ethical goals, and he placed limited ethical value on political passions.

I smiled and we both just stood there. Neither one of us made a move to go, even though it was late. A mischievous grin crept across her face. “Are you tired?” I liked the glint in her eye and I had no intention of ending this night if she didn’t want to, no matter how tired I was. “No.” “Do you want to go TP Sloan and Brandon’s house?” My laugh made her eyes dance. “I know it’s a little tenth-grade retro,” she said. “But I’ve always wanted to do it. And you can’t TP a house alone—it’s a rule.” “We’ll have to show up there tomorrow and help them clean it up. Pretend it’s just a lucky coincidence,” I said. “Can you borrow a tool from Brandon? I can text Sloan in the morning to tell her we’re going to pick it up. She’ll cook if she knows we’re coming. Then we’ll get breakfast and atone for our sins.” She grinned. A half an hour later I was crouched behind my truck two houses down from Brandon’s, game-planning with Kristen. She still hadn’t taken out her curlers. “If they wake up,” she whispered, “we scatter and reconvene at the donut place on Vanowen.” “Got it. If you’re captured, no matter what they do to you, don’t break under interrogation.” She scoffed quietly. “As if. I can’t be broken.” She snatched her roll and darted from behind the truck. We made short work of it. Operation TP Sloan and Brandon’s was completed in less than five minutes. No casualties. We got back into the truck laughing so hard it took me three tries to get the key in the ignition. Then I noticed she’d lost a curler. I got unbuckled. “No curlers left behind. It’s Marine Corps policy.” We got out for a recon mission on Brandon’s lawn. I located the fallen curler under a pile of TP by the mailbox. “Hey,” I whispered, holding it up. “Found it.” She beamed and jogged across the toilet-papered grass, but when she reached for the curler, I palmed it. “You’re injured,” I whispered. “You’ve lost a curler. The medics can reattach it, but I’ll need to carry you out. Get on my back.” I was only about 50 percent sure she would go for this. I banked on her not wanting to break character. She didn’t skip a beat. “You’re right,” she whispered. “Man down. Good call.” She jumped up and I piggybacked her to the truck, laughing the whole way. Those thirty seconds of her arms around my neck made my entire night.

Milwaukee has wormed its way into my heart. My short-sightedness kept me from seeing it sooner.

Once both male canines had collected enough smell samples from Sabrina's crotch/my dinner, we stopped laughing and managed to get inside the apartment. It was a two-room apartment on the ground floor and it was quite dark inside, with the curtains closed and only one or two lamps turned on in the entire place. Two big cats, two big dogs and two Jewish guys were sitting in the living room. There were a variety of products scattered all over the place. The room was a mess, not necessarily caused by the pets. They told us that they also have two more large cats at home in Belgium. Mario introduced us to Tom Titelany: the short, dark-haired guy who had opened the door and was the owner of the Dogue de Bordeaux. The other guy, sitting in the dark, a bit taller and skinnier with brighter skin, and brighter hair, and much brighter eyes, called Adam Maraudin, was the owner of the two large cats and the Bull Terrier jumping around. There was a huge serpent tattoo winding around Adam's shoulder, and though his tank top only revealed part of the design, it was clear that this was not an ordinary tattoo, it seemed to me to be of Far-Eastern origin or Thai. They then introduced us to Adam's girlfriend, the British Rachel Conarts, whom Adam called Shifra for some reason. She had ginger hair and was as tall as Adam, taller than Tom. There was a big bag of scuba diving kit in the living room and, when I asked them about it, they told me that Shifra and Adam had first met in Thailand, where they had been scuba diving. One of them was called Tom, the same as my name, and the other one was called Adam, coincidentally the same as my middle name. Coincidence? I don’t know.

To General Short, Washington’s warning had posed one overwhelming danger — an uprising by Hawaii’s 157,905 civilians of Japanese blood, which would coincide with any Tokyo move in the Far East. He immediately alerted his command against sabotage; lined up all his planes neatly on the ramps, where they could be more easily guarded; and notified the War Department. Washington seemed satisfied, but the fear of a Japanese Fifth Column lingered — that was the way the Axis always struck.

What I want, in short, is that my (mobile) image, buffeted among a thousand shifting photographs, altering with situation and age, should always coincide with my (profound) "self"; but it is the contrary that must be said: "myself" never coincides with my image; for it is the image which is heavy, motionless, stubborn (which is why society sustains it) , and "myself" which is light, divided, dispersed; like a bottle-imp, "myself" doesn't hold still, giggling in my jar: if only Photography could give me a neutral, anatomic body, a body which signifies nothing! Alas, I am doomed by (well meaning) Photography always to have an expression: my body never finds its zero degree, no one can give it to me (perhaps only my mother? For it is not indifference which erases the weight of the image-the Photomat always turns you into a criminal type, wanted by the police-but love, extreme love).

Traditions are conditioned reflexes. Throughout Part 2 of this book, you will find suggestions for establishing family traditions that will trigger happy anticipation and leave lasting, cherished memories. Traditions around major holidays and minor holidays. Bedtime, bath-time, and mealtime traditions; sports and pastime traditions; birthday and anniversary traditions; charitable and educational traditions. If your family’s traditions coincide with others’ observances, such as celebrating Thanksgiving, you will still make those traditions unique to your family because of the personal nuances you add. Volunteering at the food bank on Thanksgiving morning, measuring and marking their heights on the door frame in the basement, Grandpa’s artistic carving of the turkey, and their uncle’s famous gravy are the traditions our kids salivated about when they were younger, and still do on their long plane rides home at the end of November each year. (By the way, our dog Lizzy has confirmed Pavlov’s observations; when the carving knife turns on, cue the saliva, tail wagging, and doggy squealing.) But don’t limit your family’s traditions to the big and obvious events like Thanksgiving. Weekly taco nights, family book club and movie nights, pajama walks, ice cream sundaes on Sundays, backyard football during halftime of TV games, pancakes in Mom and Dad’s bed on weekends, leaf fights in the fall, walks to the sledding hill on the season’s first snow, Chinese food on anniversaries, Indian food for big occasions, and balloons hanging from the ceiling around the breakfast table on birthday mornings. Be creative, even silly. Make a secret family noise together when you’re the only ones in the elevator. When you share a secret that “can’t leave this room,” everybody knows to reach up in the air and grab the imaginary tidbit before it can get away. Have a family comedy night or a talent show on each birthday. Make holiday cards from scratch. Celebrate major family events by writing personalized lyrics to an old song and karaoking your new composition together. There are two keys to establishing family traditions: repetition and anticipation. When you find something that brings out excitement and smiles in your kids, keep doing it. Not so often that it becomes mundane, but on a regular and predictable enough basis that it becomes an ingrained part of the family repertoire. And begin talking about the traditional event days ahead of time so by the time it finally happens, your kids are beside themselves with excitement. Anticipation can be as much fun as the tradition itself.

In their important masterpiece entitled When the Earth Nearly Died, Allan and Delair write: In Europe immense herds of diverse animals utterly vanished off the face of the earth for no obvious biological reason Coincident with this dreadful slaughter upon the land was the deposition of myriads of contemporary marine shells, and the stranding at great elevations of marine mammals, porpoises, walruses and seals In Siberia, the picture is everywhere one of appalling disorder, carnage and wholesale destruction, with countless animals and plants frozen in positions of death ever since the day they perished. As a result, their remains are amazingly fresh-looking and are frequently indistinguishable from those of animals and plants that have died mere weeks ago The magnitude of the biological extinctions achieved by the Deluge almost transcends the imagination. It annihilated literally billions of biological units of both sexes and every age indiscriminately. Only incredibly powerful flood waters operating world-wide could have achieved such results, and only a flood produced by the means previously suggested could have operated globally They comment on the preposterous Ice Age theories of their predecessors. Although these theories hold little water, they are accepted by supposedly intelligent people. ...it is astonishing that such an unscientific explanation ever came to be formulated, yet in a short time both it and the concept of immense thick ice-sheets descending from a hypothetical northern mountain system, to cover all of northern and eastern North America and western and northern Eurasia, was enthusiastically embraced...as virtually established fact The evidence is perfectly unambiguous. Along with the removal of an “Ice Age” like that which has been hitherto commonly envisaged, the evidence suggests that there is something seriously amiss with the last phases of standard geological chronology Evidence thus converges from numerous directions to support the conclusion that, on the testimony of radio-carbon and other dating techniques, immense physical and climatic changes occurred on earth some 11,000 years or so ago – when an Ice Age that probably never existed came to an end, and an apparently uniformitarian regime was abruptly terminated The gigantic worldwide tectonic disturbances of the ‘late Pleistocene’ times occurred almost simultaneously on a nearly unimaginable scale – precisely what could be expected from a powerful external influence but not from the ‘Ice Age’ conditions conventionally believed to have existed then They note the change in the magnetic fields that occurred during the cataclysmic period of Earth’s recent history: Significantly, a drop in the strength of the earth’s magnetic field appears to have occurred sometime between 13,750 and 12,350 years ago...attended by various other important changes, including earthquakes, vulcanism, water table fluctuations and large scale climatic variations. Of these, severe earthquakes in particular may even induce axial wobble, and polarity reversals

We continue, however, to need "elephants" in order for us to use Berkshire’s flood of incoming cash. Charlie and I must therefore ignore the pursuit of mice and focus our acquisition efforts on much bigger game. Our exemplar is the older man who crashed his grocery cart into that of a much younger fellow while both were shopping. The elderly man explained apologetically that he had lost track of his wife and was preoccupied searching for her. His new acquaintance said that by coincidence his wife had also wandered off and suggested that it might be more efficient if they jointly looked for the two women. Agreeing, the older man asked his new companion what his wife looked like. ‘She’s a gorgeous blonde,’ the fellow answered, ‘with a body that would cause a bishop to go through a stained glass window, and she’s wearing tight white shorts. How about yours?’ The senior citizen wasted no words: ‘Forget her, we’ll look for yours.

This situation increased production and decreased overall costs, a sort of “demographic dividend”. But within the next year or so, this will end. The working-age population will start to decline for the first time. And the numbers of those over 60-65 will grow. In an interesting coincidence, the China Pavilion built for the 2010 Shanghai Expo bears a striking similarity to China’s demographic future.

This period when Christian ideas of sexual morality were challenged and overturned coincided with (and very possibly contributed to) industrialized hormonal contraception. This is not the book to debate the pros and cons of the pill—but one consequence of its availability was to sever the connection between sex and procreation. This was nothing short of revolutionary. While people in times past engaged in pre-marital sex, there was always the potential for a pregnancy to occur. Not any more—and this has enormous repercussions for how society thinks about the purpose of sex. No longer is sex assumed to take place only in marriage.

I need not recall the arguments of Zeno of Elea. They all involve the confusion of movement with the space covered, or at least the conviction that one can treat movement as one treats space, divide it without taking account of its articulations. Achilles, they say, will never overtake the tortoise he is pursuing, for when he arrives at the point where the tortoise was the latter will have had time to go further, and so on indefinitely. Philosophers have refuted this argument in numerous ways, and ways so different that each of these refutations deprives the others of the right to be considered definitive. There would have been, nevertheless, a very simple means of making short work of the difficulty: that would have been to question Achilles. For since Achilles finally catches up to the tortoise and even passes it, he must know better than anyone else how he goes about it. The ancient philosopher who demonstrated the possibility of movement by walking was right: his only mistake was to make the gesture without adding a commentary. Suppose then we ask Achilles to comment on his race: here, doubtless, is what he will answer: “Zeno insists that I go from the point where I am to the point the tortoise has left, from that point to the next point it has left, etc., etc.; that is his procedure for making me run. But I go about it otherwise. I take a first step, then a second, and so on: finally, after a certain number of steps, I take a last one by which I skip ahead of the tortoise. I thus accomplish a series of indivisible acts. My course is the series of these acts. You can distinguish its parts by the number of steps it involves. But you have not the right to disarticulate it according to another law, or to suppose it articulated in another way. To proceed as Zeno does is to admit that the race can be arbitrarily broken up like the space which has been covered; it is to believe that the passage is in reality applied to the trajectory; it is making movement and immobility coincide and consequently confusing one with the other.

Finn, short for Finnur. She had confirmed it. Iseult did one final circle around the inn as he went over every word she had said to him, looking for any evidence to further confirm his suspicions, though he was unsure of what he hoped to find. He had lied when he told her that he'd come outside to investigate the stumbling footsteps. It was merely a coincidence. He was as much a denizen of the night as any sword-for-hire, but that was not why he had ventured out. Finn had been on his mind since he'd first seen her in the common room. There was pressure in the air like a storm was coming, and storms always made Iseult uneasy. Growing up on the sea would do that to a man.

Mulroney used a little-known constitutional procedure to appoint enough senators to overcome Liberal appointees. By 1990, free trade coincided with a harsh new recession. Almost a million Canadians saw their well-paid factory jobs disappear. Mulroney was to blame.

I did Barbie’s dream as a one-off thing, but I found it haunting me; I kept having an image in my head of Martin Tenbones getting killed in real New York. Still, that would’ve been the end of it...except, by a wild coincidence, a short time later I received a postcard from Jonathan Carroll. He wrote that he’d been following my graphic novel Signal to Noise—which was being serialized in The Face magazine at the time—and he was finding a number of very scary similarities between my story and his as yet unpublished novel, A Child Across the Sky. He concluded, “We’re like two radio sets tuned to the same goofy channel.” I wrote back and said, “I think you’re right. What’s more, I abandoned a whole storyline after reading Bones of the Moon, but I keep thinking I ought to return to it.” Jonathan then sent me a wonderful letter with this advice: “Go to it, man. Ezra Pound said that every story has already been written. The purpose of a good writer is to write it new. I would very much like to see a Gaiman approach to that kind of story.” With that encouragement, I began creating A Game of You.