Cranky Villagers Quotes

I have five flashlights and each performs its own trick. I have a raincoat with zippers and net material so I never get too hot in a downpour. I have a shelf crammed with books and a shortwave that speaks Arabic, Japanese, Dutch and Russian. They have mud huts with maybe a few chairs and faded pages of old magazines fastened to the wall. I ride my twenty-one speed Peace Corps-issue bike to Ferke not to save a dollar on transport but for the luxury of exercise. They ride in from their settlements on cranky old mopeds or bikes with a single cog because it's the only option. And they give me charity. I just stare at it - near tears. To refuse their offer would be pure insult. So I do the rounds again shaking hands with all the men in boubous saying over and over "An y che " Thank you.

Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Group [ ¤ SIG AeR.WLRS 253787890.546]. Space Colonization Subgroup. Open discussion board. Okay, so imagine we get past the next few rough decades and finally do what we should have back in TwenCen. Say we mine asteroids for platinum, discover the secrets of true nanotechnology, and set Von Neumann "sheep" grazing on the moon to produce boundless wealth. To listen to some of the rest of you, all our problems would then be over. The next step, star travel, and colonization of the galaxy, would be trivial. But hold on! Even assuming we solve how to maintain long-lasting ecologies in space and get so wealthy the costs of star-flight aren't crippling, you've still got the problem of time. I mean, most hypothetical designs show likely starships creeping along at no more than ten percent of the speed of light, a whole lot slower than those sci-fi cruisers we see zipping on three-vee. At such speeds it may take five, ten generations to reach a good colony site. Meanwhile, passengers will have to maintain villages and farms and cranky, claustrophobic grandkids, all inside their hollowed-out, spinning worldlets. What kind of social engineering will that take? Do you know how to design a closed society that'd last so long without flying apart? Oh, I think it can be done. But don't pretend it'll be simple! Nor will be solving the dilemma of gene pool isolation. In the arks and zoos right now, a lot of rescued species are dying off even though the microecologies are right, simply because too few individuals were included in the original mix. For a healthy gene pool you need diversity, variety, heterozygosity. One thing's clear, no starship will make it carrying only one racial group. What'll be needed, frankly, are mongrels… people who've bred back and forth with just about everybody and seem to enjoy it.

I thought you didn’t like mines in towns,” Ethan said, “I remember you getting cranky about it.”  “I didn’t get cranky,” Mom said, exasperated.  “Yeah,” Ethan said. “You sounded just like that.” Mom pointed to an empty section of the village, “Build the mine right there. And Make it pretty! Please.” “Blech,” Elijah said, “We don’t do pretty.”  “Make it handsome then,” Mom said.  Ethan rolled his eyes. “That sounded an awful lot like a Dad joke.”  “Well, it was a Mom joke, because I said it.