Engineering Last Day Quotes

Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling. Now no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all. Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last but feelings come and go. And in fact, whatever people say, the state called ‘being in love’ usually does not last. If the old fairy-tale ending ‘They lived happily ever after’ is taken to mean ‘They felt for the next fifty years exactly as they felt the day before they were married,’ then it says what probably never was nor ever would be true, and would be highly undesirable if it were. Who could bear to live in that excitement for even five years? What would become of your work, your appetite, your sleep, your friendships? But, of course, ceasing to be ‘in love’ need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense — love as distinct from ‘being in love’ — is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be ‘in love’ with someone else. ‘Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. it is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.

The street outside is empty, lit only by a half moon; yet factory engines beat in the background and the working day is about to begin. Maggie steps out of the tenement and suddenly the street begins to fill with women, some running, some pulling their jackets around them, some lighting pipes, some, like Maggie herself, taking a pinch of snuff. From other tenements come other women, and soon all merge into one, like a herd of cattle off to market, clopping over the stone pavements and the cobbles, lowing with last night’s news.

On the first day of a college you will worry about how will you do inside the college? and at the last day of a college you will wonder what will you do outside the college?

Bu yerlerde trenler doğudan batıya, batıdan doğuya gider gelir, gider gelirdi... Bu yerlerde demiryolunun her iki yanında ıssız, engin, sarı kumlu bozkırların özeği Sarı Özek uzar giderdi. Coğrafyada uzaklıklar nasıl Greenwich meridyeninden başlıyorsa, bu yerlerde de mesafeler demiryoluna göre hesaplanırdı. Trenler ise doğudan batıya, batıdan doğuya gider gelir, gider, gelirdi...

A plane flies overhead and inside it is a writer who has spent most of his life as a law clerk, even though he’s always known deep down that he’s a writer. For the first time, he’s worked out what he wants to write, what the truth really is. He begs a napkin and a pen off the air hostess and he writes down the most beautiful sentence ever written, as the engine catches fire outside and the plane starts its plummet to the ground. It doesn’t matter to him. It’s the only sentence he’s ever written and it is the last and no part of him cares. The sentence falls through the air with singed, black edges and comes to rest in a tree, in a park, miles away. One day, around ten years from now, an old widow of an astronaut will find it when a strong breeze finally blows it from its hiding place. She will read it and she will weep.

I looked him up and down. Once before I’d seen Jericho Barrons wearing jeans and a T-shirt. It’s like sheet-metaling a W16 Bugatti Veyron engine - all 1,001 horsepower of it - with the body of a ‘65 Shelby. The height of sophisticated power sporting in-your-face, fuck-you muscle. The effect is disturbing. He had more tattoos now than he’d had a few days ago.when I’d last seen him wearing nothing but a sheen of sweat, his arms were unmarked. They were now sleeved in intricate crimson and black designs, from bicep to hand. A silver cuff gleamed in his wrist. There were chains on his boots. “Slumming, huh?” I’d said You should talk, said those dark eyes, as they swept my black leather ensemble.

While play-acting grim scenarios day in and day out may sound like a good recipe for clinical depression, it’s actually weirdly uplifting. Rehearsing for catastrophe has made me positive that I have the problem-solving skills to deal with tough situations and come out the other side smiling. For me, this has greatly reduced the mental and emotional clutter that unchecked worrying produces, those random thoughts that hijack your brain at three o’clock in the morning. While I very much hoped not to die in space, I didn’t live in fear of it, largely because I’d been made to think through the practicalities: how I’d want my family to get the news, for instance, and which astronaut I should recruit to help my wife cut through the red tape at NASA and the CSA. Before my last space flight (as with each of the earlier ones) I reviewed my will, made sure my financial affairs and taxes were in order, and did all the other things you’d do if you knew you were going to die. But that didn’t make me feel like I had one foot in the grave. It actually put my mind at ease and reduced my anxiety about what my family’s future would look like if something happened to me. Which meant that when the engines lit up at launch, I was able to focus entirely on the task at hand: arriving alive.

Its 300 stokers, trimmers, and firemen, working 100 per shift, would shovel 1,000 tons of coal a day into its 192 furnaces to heat its 25 boilers and generate enough superheated steam to spin the immense turbines of its engines.

If you could be any character on The Next Generation, who would you be?" "Easy," Solomon said. "Data. For sure." "That makes sense," Clark said. "You?" "I always liked Wesley Crusher." "What?" Solomon was appalled. "Nobody likes Wesley Crusher." "Why not?" Lisa asked. "Because he's a total Mary Sue," Solomon said. "He's too perfect." "But he's always saving the day," Clark argued. "Like, always." "Exactly. He's just a talking deus ex machina. Everybody on the ship treats him like a dumb kid, then he saves them at the last minute and, every single time, they go right back to treating him like a dumb kid again. Do I need to remind you that the starship Enterprise is full of genius scientists and engineers? Why's this kid who can't get into Starfleet Academy smarter than all of them?" "Good point," Clark said. "He's still my choice, though.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN we pray? Have you ever really thought about that? When you bow your knee and fold your hands or walk the floor with your eyes closed, opening your heart to heaven, what exactly happens? There are very few references in the Bible about the proper procedures for how to pray, and I believe that is because prayer is more about the heart’s attitude and focus than it is about whether we stand, sit, close our eyes, or any other practice we normally associate with prayer. The truth be told, if we are supposed to pray without ceasing, we should also be able to work on an engine, write an e-mail, give a presentation, change a diaper, write a report, have coffee with a friend, encourage a coworker, pay our bills, and any of the other myriad of things we do in a day while still keeping the communication lines open with heaven. I believe that every day we need focused times of prayer, but at all other times we should be in an attitude of prayer with our spiritual ears open to the thoughts of heaven. There should be seasons of intense, concentrated prayer and fasting with specified hours set aside for intercession, and there should be times when prayer is simply a regular part of our daily routine. A great interest has arisen in the last decade around 24-7 prayer rooms where different church members pray in hour-long blocks so that unbroken intercession is raised up for their city and our world. Other churches dedicate evenings solely to prayer and worship and gather believers to lift their voices in song and petition to the Lord. While all of these are wonderful things to do, at its essence prayer is simply conversation with God. Because we have changed passports from the kingdom of this world to the kingdom of heaven, we are members of God’s family and therefore have the right to talk with our Father anytime we want because He is not limited by time and space. Yet while it isn’t difficult to speak to Him, even as a babe in faith, it does take some maturity to discern His voice from the voice of our own thoughts, dreams, and desires. This is why, when I speak about prayer, I get more questions about hearing the voice of God than anything else.

XXIV. And more than that - a furlong on - why, there! What bad use was that engine for, that wheel, Or brake, not wheel - that harrow fit to reel Men's bodies out like silk? With all the air Of Tophet's tool, on earth left unaware Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel. XXV. Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood, Next a marsh it would seem, and now mere earth Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth, Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood Changes and off he goes!) within a rood - Bog, clay and rubble, sand, and stark black dearth. XXVI. Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim, Now patches where some leanness of the soil's Broke into moss, or substances like boils; Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils. XXVII. And just as far as ever from the end! Naught in the distance but the evening, naught To point my footstep further! At the thought, A great black bird, Apollyon's bosom friend, Sailed past, not best his wide wing dragon-penned That brushed my cap - perchance the guide I sought. XXVIII. For, looking up, aware I somehow grew, Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place All round to mountains - with such name to grace Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view. How thus they had surprised me - solve it, you! How to get from them was no clearer case. XXIX. Yet half I seemed to recognise some trick Of mischief happened to me, God knows when - In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then Progress this way. When, in the very nick Of giving up, one time more, came a click As when a trap shuts - you're inside the den. XXX. Burningly it came on me all at once, This was the place! those two hills on the right, Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight; While to the left a tall scalped mountain ... Dunce, Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce, After a life spent training for the sight! XXXI. What in the midst lay but the Tower itself? The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart, Built of brown stone, without a counterpart In the whole world. The tempest's mocking elf Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf He strikes on, only when the timbers start. XXXII. Not see? because of night perhaps? - why day Came back again for that! before it left The dying sunset kindled through a cleft: The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay, Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay, - Now stab and end the creature - to the heft!' XXXIII. Not hear? When noise was everywhere! it tolled Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears Of all the lost adventurers, my peers - How such a one was strong, and such was bold, And such was fortunate, yet each of old Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years. XXXIV. There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met To view the last of me, a living frame For one more picture! In a sheet of flame I saw them and I knew them all. And yet Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set, And blew. 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.

I don’t complain about the work so much as about the sluggishness of swampy time. The office hours, you see, cannot be divided up; even in the last half hour I feel the pressure of the eight hours just as much as in the first. Often it is like a train ride lasting night and day, until in the end you’re totally crushed; you no longer think about the straining of the engine, or about the hilly or flat countryside, but ascribe all that’s happening to your watch alone, which you continually hold in your palm.

It's weird not being in our subculture of two any more. There was Jen's culture, her little habits and ways of doing things; the collection of stuff she'd already learnt she loved before we met me. Chorizo and Jonathan Franken and long walks and the Eagles (her dad). Seeing the Christmas lights. Taylor Swift, frying pans in the dishwasher, the works absolutely, arsewipe, heaven. Tracy Chapman and prawn jalfrezi and Muriel Spark and HP sauce in bacon sandwiches. And then there was my culture. Steve Martin and Aston Villa and New York and E.T. Chicken bhuna, strange-looking cats and always having squash or cans of soft drinks in the house. The Cure. Pink Floyd. Kanye West, friend eggs, ten hours' sleep, ketchup in bacon sandwiches. Never missing dental check-ups. Sister Sledge (my mum). Watching TV even if the weather is nice. Cadbury's Caramel. John and Paul and George and Ringo. And then we met and fell in love and we introduced each other to all of it, like children showing each other their favourite toys. The instinct never goes - look at my fire engine, look at my vinyl collection. Look at all these things I've chosen to represent who I am. It was fun to find out about each other's self-made cultures and make our own hybrid in the years of eating, watching, reading, listening, sleeping and living together. Our culture was tea drink from very large mugs. And looking forward to the Glastonbury ticket day and the new season of Game of Thrones and taking the piss out of ourselves for being just like everyone else. Our culture was over-tipping in restaurants because we both used to work in the service industry, salty popcorn at the cinema and afternoon naps. Side-by-side morning sex. Home-made Manhattans. Barmade Manhattans (much better). Otis Redding's "Cigarettes and Coffee" (our song). Discovering a new song we both loved and listening to it over and over again until we couldn't listen to it any more. Period dramas on a Sunday night. That one perfect vibrator that finished her off in seconds when we were in a rush. Gravy. David Hockney. Truffle crisps. Can you believe it? I still can't believe it. A smell indisputably reminiscent of bums. On a crisp. And yet we couldn't get enough of them together - stuffing them in our gobs, her hand on my chest, me trying not to get crumbs in her hair as we watched Sense and Sensibility (1995). But I'm not a member of that club anymore. No one is. It's been disbanded, dissolved, the domain is no longer valid. So what do I do with all its stuff? Where so I put it all? Where do I take all my new discoveries now I'm no longer a tribe of two? And if I start a new sub-genre of love with someone else, am I allowed to bring in all the things I loved from the last one? Or would that be weird? Why do I find this so hard?

Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit. If you’re risk averse and have some doubts about the feasibility of your ideas, it’s likely that your business will be built to last. If you’re a freewheeling gambler, your startup is far more fragile. Like the Warby Parker crew, the entrepreneurs whose companies topped Fast Company’s recent most innovative lists typically stayed in their day jobs even after they launched. Former track star Phil Knight started selling running shoes out of the trunk of his car in 1964, yet kept working as an accountant until 1969. After inventing the original Apple I computer, Steve Wozniak started the company with Steve Jobs in 1976 but continued working full time in his engineering job at Hewlett-Packard until 1977. And although Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin figured out how to dramatically improve internet searches in 1996, they didn’t go on leave from their graduate studies at Stanford until 1998. “We almost didn’t start Google,” Page says, because we “were too worried about dropping out of our Ph.D. program.” In 1997, concerned that their fledgling search engine was distracting them from their research, they tried to sell Google for less than $2 million in cash and stock. Luckily for them, the potential buyer rejected the offer. This habit of keeping one’s day job isn’t limited to successful entrepreneurs. Many influential creative minds have stayed in full-time employment or education even after earning income from major projects. Selma director Ava DuVernay made her first three films while working in her day job as a publicist, only pursuing filmmaking full time after working at it for four years and winning multiple awards. Brian May was in the middle of doctoral studies in astrophysics when he started playing guitar in a new band, but he didn’t drop out until several years later to go all in with Queen. Soon thereafter he wrote “We Will Rock You.” Grammy winner John Legend released his first album in 2000 but kept working as a management consultant until 2002, preparing PowerPoint presentations by day while performing at night. Thriller master Stephen King worked as a teacher, janitor, and gas station attendant for seven years after writing his first story, only quitting a year after his first novel, Carrie, was published. Dilbert author Scott Adams worked at Pacific Bell for seven years after his first comic strip hit newspapers. Why did all these originals play it safe instead of risking it all?

In the last week of April 2004, a handful of the Abu Ghraib photographs were broadcast on 60 minutes and published in The New Yorker, and within a couple of days they had been rebroadcast and republished pretty much everywhere on earth. Overnight, the human pyramid, the hooded man on the box, the young woman soldier with a prisoner on a leash, and the corpse packed in ice had become the defining images of the Iraq war...Never before had such primal dungeon scenes been so baldly captured on camera...But above all, it was the posing soldiers, mugging for their buddies' cameras while dominating the prisoners in trophy stances, that gave the photographs the sense of unruly and unmediated reality. The staging was part of the reality they documented. And the grins, the thumbs-up, the arms crossed over puffed-out chests—all this unseemly swagger and self-regard was the height of amateurism. These soldier-photographers stood, at once, inside and outside the events they recorded, watching themselves take part in the spectacle, and their decision not to conceal but to reveal what they were doing indicated that they were not just amateur photographers, but amateur torturers. So the amateurism was not merely a formal dimension of the Abu Ghraib pictures. It was part of their content, part of what we saw in them, and it corresponded to an aspect of the Iraq War that troubled and baffled nearly everyone: the reckless and slapdash ineptitude with which it had been prosecuted. It was an amateur-run war, a murky and incoherent war. It was not clear why it was waged; too many reasons were given, none had held up, and the stories we invented to explain it to ourselves hardly seemed to matter, since once it was started the war had become its own engine—not a means to an end but an end in itself. What had been billed as a war of ideas and ideals had been exposed as a war of poses and posturing.

He wondered if other Shifters had the same homing instinct for a teleportation departure point. It never lasted long, maybe a couple of hours, a half day at most, like a subconscious computer memory. It baffled scientists years after they had first examined Lock’s abilities. Nobody had come up with an answer for that ability and Lock was unaware of how he did it. It simply existed, like his other skills.

Anyone looking up from the dock saw only beauty, on a monumental scale, while on the far side of the ship men turned black with dust as they shoveled coal—5,690 tons in all—into the ship through openings in the hull called “side pockets.” The ship burned coal at all times. Even when docked it consumed 140 tons a day to keep furnaces hot and boilers primed and to provide electricity from the ship’s dynamo to power lights, elevators, and, very important, the Marconi transmitter, whose antenna stretched between its two masts. When the Lusitania was under way, its appetite for coal was enormous. Its 300 stokers, trimmers, and firemen, working 100 per shift, would shovel 1,000 tons of coal a day into its 192 furnaces to heat its 25 boilers and generate enough superheated steam to spin the immense turbines of its engines.

Together the five orbiters Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour have flown a total of 133 successful missions, an unequaled accomplishment of engineering, management, and political savvy. But it's the two disasters that people remember, that most shape the shuttle's story. The lovely dream of spaceflight I grew up with is marred by the images of Challenger and Columbia breaking apart in the sky, the lost astronauts smiling on hopefully in their portraits, oblivious. Some people took the disasters to mean the entire space program had been a lie, that the dream itself was tainted with our fallibility. But even as a child, I knew it was more complex than that. If we want to see people take risks, we have to be prepared to sometimes see them fail. The story of American spaceflight is a story with many endings, a story of how we have weighed our achievements against our failures.

Once I was blown up in a Humvee in Afghanistan and avoided injury because the bomb went off under the engine block instead of the crew compartment—a difference of about ten feet. I was jacked with adrenaline for the next few hours and then went careening into a depression that lasted days. I became paranoid about almost everything: where I sat, where I walked, what I sat behind. It was the ten feet that got me—the fact that “so much could be determined by so little,

But he knew that time only moved evenly upon the hands of clocks: to men it can linger and almost stop dead, race on, leap chasms and linger again. He knew, with a little sadness, that it always made up its distance in the end. To-day it had travelled gropingly, like an engine in a fog, but now, with each passing hour of the holiday it would gather speed, and the days would flash by like little wayside stations. In a fortnight he would be sitting in this room on the last evening, thinking how the first night of the holiday seemed like yesterday—full of regrets at wasted time.…

At the Samarka Camp in 1946 a group of intellectuals had reached the very brink of death: They were worn down by hunger, cold, and work beyond their powers. And they were even deprived of sleep. They had nowhere to lie down. Dugout barracks had not yet been built. Did they go and steal? Or squeal? Or whimper about their ruined lives? No! Foreseeing the approach of death in days rather than weeks, here is how they spent their last sleepless leisure, sitting up against the wall: Timofeyev-Ressovsky gathered them into a “seminar,” and they hastened to share with one another what one of them knew and the others did not—they delivered their last lectures to each other. Father Savely—spoke of “unshameful death,” a priest academician—about patristics, one of the Uniate fathers—about something in the area of dogmatics and canonical writings, an electrical engineer—on the principles of the energetics of the future, and a Leningrad economist—on how the effort to create principles of Soviet economics had failed for lack of new ideas. Timofeyev-Ressovsky himself talked about the principles of microphysics. From one session to the next, participants were missing—they were already in the morgue.

America’s last step into the Vietnam quagmire came on November 22, 1963, when Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as the thirty-sixth president of the United States. Unlike Kennedy, Johnson was no real veteran. During World War II he used his influence as a congressman to become a naval officer, and, despite an utter lack of military training, he arranged a direct commission as a lieutenant commander. Fully aware that “combat” exposure would make him more electable, the ambitious Johnson managed an appointment to an observation team that was traveling to the Pacific. Once there, he was able to get a seat on a B-26 combat mission near New Guinea. The bomber had to turn back due to mechanical problems and briefly came under attack from Japanese fighters. The pilot got the damaged plane safely back to its base and Johnson left the very next day. This nonevent, which LBJ had absolutely no active part of, turned into his war story. The engine had been “knocked out” by enemy fighters, not simply a routine malfunction; he, LBJ, had been part of a “suicide mission,” not just riding along as baggage. The fabrication grew over time, including, according to LBJ, the nickname of “Raider” Johnson given to him by the awestruck 22nd Bomber Group.

We visit the Launch Control building, where on one wall of the seventies-style lobby are hung the mission patches of every human spaceflight that has ever been launched from here, 149 to date. Beneath each mission patch is a small plaque showing the launch and landing dates. Two of them—Challenger’s STS-51L and Columbia’s STS-107—are missing landing dates, because both of these missions ended in disasters that destroyed the orbiters and killed their crews. The blank spaces on the wall where those landing dates should have been are discolored from the touch of people’s hands. This would be unremarkable if this place were a tourist attraction, or regularly open to the public. But with the rare exception of Family Days, this building is open only to people who work here. In other words, it’s launch controllers, managers, and engineers who have been touching these empty spaces with their hands, on their way to and from doing their jobs. After

But wait, stop, it’s not supposed to end this way! You’re the fantasy, you’re what I’m leaving behind. I can’t pack you up and take you with me.” “That was the most self-centered thing I’ve ever heard you say.” Jane blinked. “It was?” “Miss Hayes, have you stopped to consider that you might have this all backward? That in fact you are my fantasy?” The jet engines began to whir, the pressure of the cabin stuck invisible fingers into her ears. Henry gripped his armrest and stared ahead as though trying to steady the machine by force of will. Jane laughed at him and settled into her seat. It was a long flight. There would be time to get more answers, and she thought she could wait. Then in that moment when the plane rushed forward as though for its life, and gravity pushed down, and the plane lifted up, and Jane was breathless inside those two forces, she needed to know now. “Henry, tell me which parts were true.” “All of it. Especially this part where I’m going to die…” His knuckles were literally turning white as he held tighter to the armrests, his eyes staring straight ahead. The light gushing through the window was just right, afternoon coming at them with the perfect slant, the sun grazing the horizon of her window, yellow light spilling in. She saw Henry clearly, noticed a chicken pox scar on his forehead, read in the turn down of his upper lip how he must have looked as a pouty little boy and in the faint lines tracing away from the corners of his eyes the old man he’d one day become. Her imagination expanded. She had seen her life like an intricate puzzle, all the boyfriends like dominoes, knocking the next one and the next, an endless succession of falling down. But maybe that wasn’t it at all. She’d been thinking so much about endings, she’d forgotten to allow for the possibility of a last one, one that might stay standing. Jane pried his right hand off the armrest, placed it on the back of her neck and held it there. She lifted the armrest so nothing was between them and held his face with her other hand. It was a fine face, a jaw that fit in her palm. She could feel the whiskers growing back that he’d shaved that morning. He was looking at her again, though his expression couldn’t shake off the terror, which made Jane laugh. “How can you be so cavalier?” he asked. “Tens of thousands of pounds expected to just float in the air?” She kissed him, and he tasted so yummy, not like food or mouthwash or chapstick, but like a man. He moaned once in surrender, his muscles relaxing. “I knew I really liked you,” he said against her lips. His fingers pulled her closer, his other hand reached for her waist. His kisses became hungry, and she guessed that he hadn’t been kissed, not for real, for a long time. Neither had she, as a matter of fact. Maybe this was the very first time. There was little similarity to the empty, lusty making out she’d played at with Martin. Kissing Henry was more than just plain fun. Later, when they would spend straight hours conversing in the dark, Jane would realize that Henry kissed the way he talked--his entire attention taut, focused, intensely hers. His touch was a conversation, telling her again and again that only she in the whole world really mattered. His lips only drifted from hers to touch her face, her hands, her neck. And when he spoke, he called her Jane. Her stomach dropped as they fled higher into the sky, and they kissed recklessly for hundreds of miles, until Henry was no longer afraid of flying.

In the eighteenth century, there was said to be a man who had read every book written. But nowadays, if you read one book a day, it would take you many tens of thousands of years to read through the books in a national library. By which time, many more books would have been written. This has meant that no one person can be the master of more than a small corner of human knowledge. People have to specialise, in narrower and narrower fields. This is likely to be a major limitation in the future. We certainly cannot continue, for long, with the exponential rate of growth of knowledge that we have had in the last 300 years. An even greater limitation and danger for future generations is that we still have the instincts, and in particular the aggressive impulses, that we had in caveman days. Aggression, in the form of subjugating or killing other men and taking their women and food, has had definite survival advantage up to the present time. But now it could destroy the entire human race and much of the rest of life on Earth. A nuclear war is still the most immediate danger, but there are others, such as the release of a genetically engineered virus. Or the greenhouse effect becoming unstable.

Vern did not trust humans was the long and short of it. Not a single one. He had known many in his life, even liked a few, but in the end they all sold him out to the angry mob. Which was why he holed up in Honey Island Swamp out of harm's way. Vern liked the swamp okay. As much as he liked anything after all these years. Goddamn, so many years just stretching out behind him like bricks in that road old King Darius put down back in who gives a shit BC. Funny how things came back out of the blue. Like that ancient Persian road. He couldn't remember last week, and now he was flashing back a couple thousand years, give or take. Vern had baked half those bricks his own self, back when he still did a little blue-collar. Nearly wore out the internal combustion engine. Shed his skin two seasons early because of that bitch of a job. That and diet. No one had a clue about nutrition in those days. Vern was mostly ketogenic now, high fat, low carbs, apart from his beloved breakfast cereals. Keto made perfect sense for a dragon, especially with his core temperature. Unfortunately, it meant that beer had to go, but he got by on vodka. Absolut was his preferred brand. A little high on alcohol but easiest on the system.

Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie When yer head gets twisted and yer mind grows numb When you think you're too old, too young, too smart or too dumb When yer laggin' behind an' losin' yer pace In a slow-motion crawl of life's busy race No matter what yer doing if you start givin' up If the wine don't come to the top of yer cup If the wind's got you sideways with with one hand holdin' on And the other starts slipping and the feeling is gone And yer train engine fire needs a new spark to catch it And the wood's easy findin' but yer lazy to fetch it And yer sidewalk starts curlin' and the street gets too long And you start walkin' backwards though you know its wrong And lonesome comes up as down goes the day And tomorrow's mornin' seems so far away And you feel the reins from yer pony are slippin' And yer rope is a-slidin' 'cause yer hands are a-drippin' And yer sun-decked desert and evergreen valleys Turn to broken down slums and trash-can alleys And yer sky cries water and yer drain pipe's a-pourin' And the lightnin's a-flashing and the thunder's a-crashin' And the windows are rattlin' and breakin' and the roof tops a-shakin' And yer whole world's a-slammin' and bangin' And yer minutes of sun turn to hours of storm And to yourself you sometimes say "I never knew it was gonna be this way Why didn't they tell me the day I was born" And you start gettin' chills and yer jumping from sweat And you're lookin' for somethin' you ain't quite found yet And yer knee-deep in the dark water with yer hands in the air And the whole world's a-watchin' with a window peek stare And yer good gal leaves and she's long gone a-flying And yer heart feels sick like fish when they're fryin' And yer jackhammer falls from yer hand to yer feet And you need it badly but it lays on the street And yer bell's bangin' loudly but you can't hear its beat And you think yer ears might a been hurt Or yer eyes've turned filthy from the sight-blindin' dirt And you figured you failed in yesterdays rush When you were faked out an' fooled white facing a four flush And all the time you were holdin' three queens And it's makin you mad, it's makin' you mean Like in the middle of Life magazine Bouncin' around a pinball machine And there's something on yer mind you wanna be saying That somebody someplace oughta be hearin' But it's trapped on yer tongue and sealed in yer head And it bothers you badly when your layin' in bed And no matter how you try you just can't say it And yer scared to yer soul you just might forget it And yer eyes get swimmy from the tears in yer head And yer pillows of feathers turn to blankets of lead And the lion's mouth opens and yer staring at his teeth And his jaws start closin with you underneath And yer flat on your belly with yer hands tied behind And you wish you'd never taken that last detour sign And you say to yourself just what am I doin' On this road I'm walkin', on this trail I'm turnin' On this curve I'm hanging On this pathway I'm strolling, in the space I'm taking In this air I'm inhaling Am I mixed up too much, am I mixed up too hard Why am I walking, where am I running What am I saying, what am I knowing On this guitar I'm playing, on this banjo I'm frailin' On this mandolin I'm strummin', in the song I'm singin' In the tune I'm hummin', in the words I'm writin' In the words that I'm thinkin' In this ocean of hours I'm all the time drinkin' Who am I helping, what am I breaking What am I giving, what am I taking But you try with your whole soul best Never to think these thoughts and never to let Them kind of thoughts gain ground Or make yer heart pound ...

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

I pull into the driveway outside of my father's house and shut off the engine. I sit behind the wheel for a moment, studying the house. He'd called me last night and demanded that I come over for dinner tonight. Didn't request. He demanded. What struck me though, was that he sounded a lot more stressed out and harried than he did when he interrupted my brunch with Gabby to demand my presence at a “family”dinner. Yeah, that had been a fun night filled with my father and Ian badgering me about my job. For whatever reason, they'd felt compelled to make a concerted effort to belittle what I do –more so than they usually do anyway -- try to undermine my confidence in my ability to teach, and all but demand that I quit and come to work for my father's company. That had been annoying, and although they were more insistent than normal, it's pretty par for the course with those two. They always think they know what's best for me and have no qualms about telling me how to live my life. When he'd called me last night though, and told me to come to dinner tonight, there was something in my father's voice that had rattled me. It took me a while to put a finger on what it was I heard in his voice, but when I figured it out, it really shook me. I heard fear. Outright fear. My father isn't a man who fears much or is easily intimidated. In fact, he's usually the one doing the intimidating. But, something has him really spooked and even though we don't always see eye-to-eye or get along, hearing that fear in his voice scared me. In all my years, I've never known him to sound so downright terrified. With a sigh and a deep sense of foreboding, I climb out of my car and head to the door, trying to steel myself more with each step. Call me psychic, but I have a feeling that this is going to be a long, miserable night. “Good evening, Miss Holly,”Gloria says as she opens the door before I even have a chance to knock. “Nice to see you again.”“It's nice to see you too, Gloria,”I say and smile with genuine affection. Gloria has been with our family for as far back as I can remember. Honestly, after my mother passed away from ovarian cancer, Gloria took a large role in raising me. My father had plunged himself into his work –and had taken Ian under his wing to help groom him to take over the empire one day –leaving me to more or less fend for myself. It was like I was a secondary consideration to them. Because I'm a girl and not part of the testosterone-rich world of construction, neither my father nor Ian took much interest in me or my life. Unless they needed something from me, of course. The only time they really paid any attention to me was when they needed me to pose for family pictures for company literature.

On the train I had a lot of time to think. I thought how in the thirty years of my life I had seldom gotten on a train in America without being conscious of my color. In the South, there are Jim Crow cars and Negroes must ride separate from the whites, usually in a filthy antiquated coach next to the engine, getting all the smoke and bumps and dirt. In the South, we cannot buy sleeping car tickets. Such comforts are only for white folks. And in the North where segregated travel is not the law, colored people have, nevertheless, many difficulties. In auto buses they must take the seats in the rear, over the wheels. On the boats they must occupy the worst cabins. The ticket agents always say that all other accommodations are sold. On trains, if one sits down by a white person, the white person will sometimes get up, flinging back an insult at the Negro who has dared to take a seat beside him. Thus it is that in America, if you are yellow, brown, or black, you can never travel anywhere without being reminded of your color, and oft-times suffering great inconveniences. I sat in the comfortable sleeping car on my first day out of Moscow and remembered many things about trips I had taken in America. I remembered how, once as a youngster going alone to see my father who was working in Mexico, I went into the dining car of the train to eat. I sat down at a table with a white man. The man looked at me and said, "You're a nigger, ain't you?" and left the table. It was beneath his dignity to eat with a Negro child. At St. Louis I went onto the station platform to buy a glass of milk. The clerk behind the counter said, “We don't serve niggers," and refused to sell me anything. As I grew older I learned to expect this often when traveling. So when I went South to lecture on my poetry at Negro universities, I carried my own food because I knew I could not go into the dining cars. Once from Washington to New Orleans, I lived all the way on the train on cold food. I remembered this miserable trip as I sat eating a hot dinner on the diner of the Moscow-Tashkent express. Traveling South from New York, at Washington, the capital of our country, the official Jim Crow begins. There the conductor comes through the train and, if you are a Negro, touches you on the shoulder and says, "The last coach forward is the car for colored people." Then you must move your baggage and yourself up near the engine, because when the train crosses the Potomac River into Virginia, and the dome of the Capitol disappears, it is illegal any longer for white people and colored people to ride together. (Or to eat together, or sleep together, or in some places even to work together.) Now I am riding South from Moscow and am not Jim-Crowed, and none of the darker people on the train with me are Jim-Crowed, so I make a happy mental note in the back of my mind to write home to the Negro papers: "There is no Jim Crow on the trains of the Soviet Union.

The government doesn’t care if our kids learn to think or learn for the sake of learning, as long they learn to love their country, and grow up and pay taxes. How much of what we learnt in 10 years of our schooling actually comes handy in our day-to-day lives? Why can’t we learn useful skills, like cooking, in school that actually come in handy when it comes to survival? Does schooling need to last for 10 years? Is it possible to complete schooling in 7 years? Nobody knows and schools have done a great job at not letting us ask questions. We live in times where we cautiously invest 4 years in undergrad schools or 2 years in B-schools in the hope that we acquire strong skills or at least secure a job. Schooling, as it exists, is a 10-year course that neither helps us get a job nor imparts a skill and unfortunately, it is compulsory. Half the jobs that exist today won’t even exist 10 years from now. That’s how fast the world is progressing. We still ask our kids to learn when Shah Jahan was born. It is a joke that at the end of these 10 years, we are expected to choose a career in science, commerce, or arts when school education hardly helped us explore ourselves. Some of the world’s greatest artists, athletes, inventors and scientists are from India. Unfortunately, they are all engineers and tragically none of them know about their talents. The biggest reason for this tragedy isn’t the society, parenting, coaching or anything else. The school is the reason and they too are all eventually victims of the same century-old schooling system. In the legendary words of Kevin Spacey from Usual Suspects, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” and our school is our society’s biggest devil.

The men entered the sumptuously furnished reception room of the office suite. After the first greeting, they were silent, uncomfortable. They didn’t know what to say. Doc Savage’s father had died from a weird cause since they last saw Doc. The elder Savage had been known throughout the world for his dominant bearing and his good work. Early in life, he had amassed a tremendous fortune— for one purpose. That purpose was to go here and there, from one end of the world to the other, looking for excitement and adventure, striving to help those who needed help, punishing those who deserved it. To that creed he had devoted his life. His fortune had dwindled to practically nothing. But as it shrank, his influence had increased. It was unbelievably wide, a heritage befitting the man. Greater even, though, was the heritage he had given his son. Not in wealth, but in training to take up his career of adventure and righting of wrongs where it left off. Clark Savage, Jr., had been reared from the cradle to become the supreme adventurer. Hardly had Doc learned to walk, when his father started him taking the routine of exercises to which he still adhered. Two hours each day, Doc exercised intensively all his muscles, senses, and his brain. As a result of these exercises, Doc possessed a strength superhuman. There was no magic about it, though. Doc had simply built up muscle intensively all his life. Doc’s mental training had started with medicine and surgery. It had branched out to include all arts and sciences. Just as Doc could easily overpower the gorilla-like Monk in spite of his great strength, so did Doc know more about chemistry. And that applied to Renny, the engineer; Long Tom, the electrical wizard; Johnny, the geologist and the archaeologist; and Ham, the lawyer. Doc had been well trained for his work.

How Could You Not - for Jane Kenyon It is a day after many days of storms. Having been washed and washed, the air glitters; small heaped cumuli blow across the sky; a shower visible against the firs douses the crocuses. We knew it would happen one day this week. Now, when I learn you have died, I go to the open door and look across at New Hampshire and see that there, too, the sun is bright and clouds are making their shadowy ways along the horizon; and I think: How could it not have been today? In another room, Keri Te Kanawa is singing the Laudate Dominum of Mozart, very faintly, as if in the past, to those who once sat in the steel seat of the old mowing machine, cheerful descendent of the scythe of the grim reaper, and drew the cutter bars little reciprocating triangles through the grass to make the stalks lie down in sunshine. Could you have walked in the dark early this morning and found yourself grown completely tired of the successes and failures of medicine, of your year of pain and despair remitted briefly now and then by hope that had that leaden taste? Did you glimpse in first light the world as you loved it and see that, now, it was not wrong to die and that, on dying, you would leave your beloved in a day like paradise? Near sunrise did you loosen your hold a little? How could you not already have felt blessed for good, having these last days spoken your whole heart to him, who spoke his whole heart to you, so that in the silence he would not feel a single word was missing? How could you not have slipped into a spell, in full daylight, as he lay next to you, with his arms around you, as they have been, it must have seemed, all your life? How could your cheek not press a moment to his cheek, which presses itself to yours from now on? How could you not rise and go, with all that light at the window, those arms around you, and the sound, coming or going, hard to say, of a single-engine plane in the distance that no one else hears?

entire project would be kicked back, and he would need to start the submission process again. The proposal had to be perfect this time. If not, he was sure his competitors would swoop in on this opportunity to launch their own devices. He had spent the last two years on this project, and he was so close—only twenty-seven days left to make all the necessary corrections. He could not afford distractions now. Too much was riding on this; his name was riding on this. He remembered what his father always told him: “No one remembers the name of the person who came in second.” These words motivated him all through high school to earn a full scholarship to Boston University, where he earned his BA and master’s degrees in computer science, and then his PhD in robotics engineering at MIT. Those degrees had driven him to start his own business, Vinchi Medical Engineering, and at age thirty-four, he still lived by those words to keep the company on top. The intercom buzzed. “Your conference call is ready on line one, Mr. Vinchi.” “What the hell were you guys thinking?” Jon barked as soon as he got on the line. Not waiting for them to answer, Jon continued, “Whose bright idea was it to submit my name to participate at this event—or any event, for that matter? This type of thing has your name written all over it, Drew. Is this your doing?” As always, Trent said it the way it was. “If you had attended the last meeting, Jon, you would have been brought up to date for this and would have had the chance to voice any opposition to your participation.” It was a moot point, Jon knew he’d missed their last meeting—actually, their last few meetings—due to his own business needs. But this stunt wasn’t solely about the meeting, and he knew it. “Trent, I have always supported the decisions you guys have made in the past, but I am not supporting this one. What makes you think I will even show? I don’t have time for this nonsense.” “Time is valuable to all of us, Jon. We all have our own companies to run besides supporting what is needed for Takes One. Either you’re fully invested in this, or you’re not. There are times when it takes more than

And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like com-passes, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves. All their attention and strength must go to the accomplishment of the mean act. The eye of the soul must be bent upon the finger-point, and the soul's force must fill all the invisible nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its steely precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole human being be lost at last - a heap of sawdust, so far as its intellectual work in this world is concerned. saved only by its Heart, which cannot go into the form of cogs and compasses, but expands, after the ten hours are over, into fireside humanity. On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing, and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dulness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only when we see the clouds settling upon him. And, whether the clouds be bright or dark, there will be transfiguration behind and within them. And now, reader, look round this English room of yours, about which you have been proud so often, because the work of it was so good and strong, and the ornaments of it so finished. Examine again all those accurate mouldings, and perfect polishings, and unerring adjustments of the seasoned wood and tempered steel. Many a time you have exulted over them, and thought how great England was, because her slightest work was done so thoroughly. Alas! if read rightly, these perfectnesses are signs of a slavery in our England.

Is power like the vis viva and the quantite d’avancement? That is, is it conserved by the universe, or is it like shares of a stock, which may have great value one day, and be worthless the next? If power is like stock shares, then it follows that the immense sum thereof lately lost by B[olingbroke] has vanished like shadows in sunlight. For no matter how much wealth is lost in stock crashes, it never seems to turn up, but if power is conserved, then B’s must have gone somewhere. Where is it? Some say ‘twas scooped up by my Lord R, who hid it under a rock, lest my Lord M come from across the sea and snatch it away. My friends among the Whigs say that any power lost by a Tory is infallibly and insensibly distributed among all the people, but no matter how assiduously I search the lower rooms of the clink for B’s lost power, I cannot seem to find any there, which explodes that argument, for there are assuredly very many people in those dark salons. I propose a novel theory of power, which is inspired by . . . the engine for raising water by fire. As a mill makes flour, a loom makes cloth and a forge makes steel, so we are assured this engine shall make power. If the backers of this device speak truly, and I have no reason to deprecate their honesty, it proves that power is not a conserved quantity, for of such quantities, it is never possible to make more. The amount of power in the world, it follows, is ever increasing, and the rate of increase grows ever faster as more of these engines are built. A man who hordes power is therefore like a miser who sits on a heap of coins in a realm where the currency is being continually debased by the production of more coins than the market can bear. So that what was a great fortune, when first he raked it together, insensibly becomes a slag heap, and is found to be devoid of value. When at last he takes it to the marketplace to be spent. Thus my Lord B and his vaunted power hoard what is true of him is likely to be true of his lackeys, particularly his most base and slavish followers such as Mr. Charles White. This varmint has asserted that he owns me. He fancies that to own a man is to have power, yet he has got nothing by claiming to own me, while I who was supposed to be rendered powerless, am now writing for a Grub Street newspaper that is being perused by you, esteemed reader.

I had this book when I was a little kid," Eddie said at last. He spoke in the flat tones of utter surety. "Then we moved from Queens to Brooklyn--I wasn't even four years old--and I lost it. But I remember the picture on the cover. And I felt the same way you do, Jake. I didn't like it. I didn't trust it." Susannah raised her eyes to look at Eddie. "I had it, too--how could I ever forget the little girl with my name...although of course it was my middle name back in those days. And I felt the same way about the train. I didn't like it and I didn't trust it." She tapped the front of the book with her finger before passing it on to Roland. "I thought that smile was a great big fake." Roland gave it only a cursory glance before returning his eyes to Susannah. "Did you lose yours, too?" "Yes." "And I'll bet I know when," Eddie said. Susannah nodded. "I'll bet you do. It was after that man dropped the brick on my head. I had it when we went north to my Aunt Blue's wedding. I had it on the train. I remember, because I kept asking my dad if Charlie the Choo-Choo was pulling us. I didn't WANT it to be Charlie, because we were supposed to go to Elizabeth, New Jersey, and I thought Charlie might take us anywhere. Didn't he end up pulling folks around a toy village or something like that, Jake?" "An amusement park." "Yes, of course it was. There's a picture of him hauling kids around that place at the end, isn't there? They're all smiling and laughing, except I always thought they looked like they were screaming to be let off." "Yes!" Jake cried. "Yes, that's right! That's JUST right!" "I thought Charlie might take us to HIS place--wherever he lived--instead of to my aunt's wedding, and never let us go home again." "You can't go home again," Eddie muttered, and ran his hands nervously through his hair. "All the time we were on that train I wouldn't let go of the book. I even remember thinking, 'If he tries to steal us, I'll rip out his pages until he quits.' But of course we arrived right where we were supposed to, and on time, too. Daddy even took me up front, so I could see the engine. It was a diesel, not a steam engine, and I remember that made me happy. Then, after the wedding, that man Mort dropped the brick on me and I was in a coma for a long time. I never saw Charlie the Choo-Choo after that. Not until now." She hesitated, then added: "This could be my copy, for all I know--or Eddie's." "Yeah, and probably is," Eddie said.

With the increasing recognition of Jews as the parasitic germs of these diseases, state after state was forced in the last years to take a position on this fateful question for nations. Imbued with the instinct of self-preservation, they had to take those measures which were suited to protect for good their own people against this international poison. Even if Bolshevik Russia is the concrete product of this Jewish infection, one should not forget that democratic capitalism creates the conditions for it. In this way, the Jews prepare what the same Jews execute in the second stage of this process. In the first stage, they deprive the majority of men of their rights and reduce them to helpless slaves. Or, as they themselves put it, they make them expropriated proletarians in order to spur them on, as a fanaticized mob, to destroy the foundations of their state. Later, this is followed by the extermination of their own national intelligentsia, and finally by the elimination of all cultural foundations that, as a thousand-year-old heritage, could provide these people with their inner worth or serve as a warning to the future. What remains after that is the beast in man and a Jewish class that, as parasites in leadership positions, will in the end destroy the fertile soil on which it thrives. On this process-which according to Mommsen results in the Jewish engineered decomposition of people and states-the young, awakening Europe has now declared war. Proud and honorable people in other parts of the world have allied themselves to it. They will be joined by hundreds of millions of oppressed men who, irrespective of how their present leaders may view this, will one day break their chains. The end of these liars will come, liars who claim to protect the world against a threatening domination but who actually only seek to save their own world-rule. We are now in the midst of this mighty, truly historic awakening of the people, partly as leading, acting, or performing men. On the one side stand the men of the democracies that form the heart of Jewish capitalism, with their whole dead weight of dusty theories of state, their parliamentary corruption, their outdated social order, their Jewish brain trusts, their Jewish newspapers, stock exchanges, and banks-a combination, a mix of political and economic racketeers of the worst sort; on their side, there is the Bolshevik state, that is, that number of brutish men over whom the Jew, as in the Soviet Union, wields his bloody whip. And on the other side stand those nations who fight for their freedom and independence, for the securing of their people’s daily bread. Adolf Hitler – speech to the Reichstag April 26, 1942

I’m having my lunch when I hear a familiar hoarse shout, ‘Oy Tony!’ I whip round, damaging my neck further, to see Michael Gambon in the lunch queue. … Gambon tells me the story of Olivier auditioning him at the Old Vic in 1962. His audition speech was from Richard III. ‘See, Tone, I was thick as two short planks then and I didn’t know he’d had a rather notable success in the part. I was just shitting myself about meeting the Great Man. He sussed how green I was and started farting around.’ As reported by Gambon, their conversation went like this: Olivier: ‘What are you going to do for me?’ Gambon: ‘Richard the Third.’ Olivier: ‘Is that so. Which part?’ Gambon: ‘Richard the Third.’ Olivier: ‘Yes, but which part?’ Gambon: ‘Richard the Third.’ Olivier: ‘Yes, I understand that, but which part?’ Gambon: ‘Richard the Third.’ Olivier: ‘But which character? Catesby? Ratcliffe? Buckingham’s a good part …’ Gambon: ‘Oh I see, beg your pardon, no, Richard the Third.’ Olivier: ‘What, the King? Richard?’ Gambon: ‘ — the Third, yeah.’ Olivier: “You’ve got a fucking cheek, haven’t you?’ Gambon: ‘Beg your pardon?’ Olivier: ‘Never mind, which part are you going to do?’ Gambon: ‘Richard the Third.’ Olivier: ‘Don’t start that again. Which speech?’ Gambon: ‘Oh I see, beg your pardon, “Was every woman in this humour woo’d.”‘ Olivier: ‘Right. Whenever you’re ready.’ Gambon: ‘ “Was ever woman in this humour woo’d –” ‘ Olivier: ‘Wait. Stop. You’re too close. Go further away. I need to see the whole shape, get the full perspective.’ Gambon: ‘Oh I see, beg your pardon …’ Gambon continues, ‘So I go over to the far end of the room, Tone, thinking that I’ve already made an almighty tit of myself, so how do I save the day? Well I see this pillar and I decide to swing round it and start the speech with a sort of dramatic punch. But as I do this my ring catches on a screw and half my sodding hand gets left behind. I think to myself, “Now I mustn’t let this throw me since he’s already got me down as a bit of an arsehole”, so I plough on … “Was ever woman in this humour woo’d –”‘ Olivier: ‘Wait. Stop. What’s the blood?’ Gambon: ‘Nothing, nothing, just a little gash, I do beg your pardon …’ A nurse had to be called and he suffered the indignity of being given first aid with the greatest actor in the world passing the bandages. At last it was done. Gambon: ‘Shall I start again?’ Olivier: ‘No. I think I’ve got a fair idea how you’re going to do it. You’d better get along now. We’ll let you know.’ Gambon went back to the engineering factory in Islington where he was working. At four that afternoon he was bent over his lathe, working as best as he could with a heavily bandaged hand, when he was called to the phone. It was the Old Vic. ‘It’s not easy talking on the phone, Tone. One, there’s the noise of the machinery. Two, I have to keep my voice down ’cause I’m cockney at work and posh with theatre people. But they offer me a job, spear-carrying, starting immediately. I go back to my work-bench, heart beating in my chest, pack my tool-case, start to go. The foreman comes up, says, “Oy, where you off to?” “I’ve got bad news,” I say, “I’ve got to go.” He says, “Why are you taking your tool box?” I say, “I can’t tell you, it’s very bad news, might need it.” And I never went back there, Tone. Home on the bus, heart still thumping away. A whole new world ahead. We tend to forget what it felt like in the beginning.

So it was always at night, like a werewolf, that I would take the thing out for an honest run down the coast. I would start in Golden Gate Park, thinking only to run a few long curves to clear my head. . . but in a matter of minutes I'd be out at the beach with the sound of the engine in my ears, the surf booming up on the sea wall and a fine empty road stretching all the way down to Santa Cruz. . . not even a gas station in the whole seventy miles; the only public light along the way is an all-​night diner down around Rockaway Beach. There was no helmet on those nights, no speed limit, and no cooling it down on the curves. The momentary freedom of the park was like the one unlucky drink that shoves a wavering alcoholic off the wagon. I would come out of the park near the soccer field and pause for a moment at the stop sign, wondering if I knew anyone parked out there on the midnight humping strip. Then into first gear, forgetting the cars and letting the beast wind out. . . thirty-​five, forty-​five. . . then into second and wailing through the light at Lincoln Way, not worried about green or red signals, but only some other werewolf loony who might be pulling out, too slowly, to start his own run. Not many of these. . . and with three lanes on a wide curve, a bike coming hard has plenty of room to get around almost anything. . . then into third, the boomer gear, pushing seventy-​five and the beginning of a windscream in the ears, a pressure on the eyeballs like diving into water off a high board. Bent forward, far back on the seat, and a rigid grip on the handlebars as the bike starts jumping and wavering in the wind. Taillights far up ahead coming closer, faster, and suddenly -- zaaapppp -- going past and leaning down for a curve near the zoo, where the road swings out to sea. The dunes are flatter here, and on windy days sand blows across the highway, piling up in thick drifts as deadly as any oil-​slick. . . instant loss of control, a crashing, cartwheeling slide and maybe one of those two-​inch notices in the paper the next day: “An unidentified motorcyclist was killed last night when he failed to negotiate a turn on Highway I.” Indeed. . . but no sand this time, so the lever goes up into fourth, and now there's no sound except wind. Screw it all the way over, reach through the handlebars to raise the headlight beam, the needle leans down on a hundred, and wind-​burned eyeballs strain to see down the centerline, trying to provide a margin for the reflexes. But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right. . . and that's when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it. . . howling through a turn to the right, then to the left and down the long hill to Pacifica. . . letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge. . . The Edge. . . There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others -- the living -- are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In. The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions.

The Lowly Thermostat, Now Minter of Megawatts How Nest is turning its consumer hit into a service for utilities. Peter Fairley | 945 words • Google’s $3.2 billion acquisition of Nest Labs in January put the Internet of things on the map. Everyone had vaguely understood that connecting everyday objects to the Internet could be a big deal. Here was an eye-popping price tag to prove it. Nest, founded by former Apple engineers in 2010, had managed to turn the humble thermostat into a slick, Internet-connected gadget. By this year, Nest was selling 100,000 of them a month, according to an estimate by Morgan Stanley. At $249 a pop, that’s a nice business. But more interesting is what Nest has been up to since last May in Texas, where an Austin utility is paying Nest to remotely turn down people’s air conditioners in order to conserve power on hot summer days—just when electricity is most expensive. For utilities, this kind of “demand response” has long been seen as a killer app for a smart electrical grid, because if electricity use can be lowered just enough at peak times, utilities can avoid firing up costly (and dirty) backup plants. Demand response is a neat trick. The Nest thermostat manages it by combining two things that are typically separate—price information and control over demand. It’s consumers who control the air conditioners, electric heaters, and furnaces that dominate a home’s energy diet. But the actual cost of energy can vary widely, in ways that consumers only dimly appreciate and can’t influence. While utilities frequently carry out demand

Being constantly active made time fly, and so it didn’t take long before the day of departure came. With the last of everything aboard, we set sail just as many did before us. We were among those that continued the tradition of... “they that go down to the sea in ships” and we were very aware that this tradition rested on our shoulders. On January 4, 1953, with the sound of three short blasts on the ship’s whistle, we backed away from the pier. This ship was unlike most ships and we all noticed a definite difference in her sounds and vibrations. At that time, most American vessels were driven by steam propulsion that relied on superheating the water. The reciprocating steam engines, with their large pistons, were the loudest as they hissed and wheezed, turning a huge crankshaft. Steam turbines were relatively vibration free, but live steam was always visible as it powered the many pumps, winches, etc. Steam is powerful and efficient, but can be dangerous and even deadly. Diesel engines were seldom used on the larger American ships of that era, and were not considered cost or energy efficient. The TS Empire State was a relatively quiet ship since she only used steam power to drive the turbines, which then spun the generators that made the electricity needed to energize the powerful electric motors, which were directly geared to turn the propeller shafts. All in all, the ship was nearly vibration free, making for a smooth ride.

There it is—his million-dollar smile. I can’t see his dimple winking at me, but I know that it is. He runs his hand through my long, thick dark-brown curls and starts to massage the back of my neck. As he leans towards me, I find myself playing with his pierced nipple. His lips are centimeters away from mine, my heart is pounding in my head, and I can barely remember to breath. His other hand slides up my bare thigh, and I close my eyes. I can feel the heat from his breath along my jaw. His lips graze the bottom of my ear lobe, and when I hear him whisper those three little words in my ear, I wonder if I am actually dreaming. When he brushes my bottom lip with his tongue, I know that I am wide awake. I can feel my heart beginning to crack, knowing that this will not be able to last much longer. He begins to graze kisses along my jaw. When our lips meet, I know that I will be broken for a long time. I could kiss him forever, and I want to, but I only have minutes. I want days. I want weeks. I want forever! As he pulls away and our eyes meet, I realize that I don’t get any of those things. All I get is one last swift kiss before he’s gone. I lie down on my bed, curl into a tight little ball, and begin to cry. When I hear his car start, I feel the crack in my chest getting bigger, and as the sounds of his engine start to dissipate, knowing that’s he’s gone, realizing that I was head over heels in love with him but didn’t tell him, that’s when my heart shatters completely.

Being constantly active made time fly, and so it didn’t take long before the day of departure came. It was January 4, 1953, and with the last of everything we needed aboard, we set sail just as many did before us. We were among those that continued the tradition of... “they that go down to the sea in ships” and we were very aware that this tradition rested on our shoulders. With the sound of three short blasts on the ship’s whistle, we backed away from the pier. This ship was unlike most ships of that era and we all noticed a definite difference in her sounds and vibrations. At that time, most American vessels were driven by steam propulsion that relied on superheating the water. The reciprocating steam engines, with their large pistons were the loudest as they hissed and wheezed, turning a huge crankshaft. Steam turbines were relatively vibration free, but live steam was always visible as it powered the many pumps, winches, etc. Steam is powerful and efficient, but can be dangerous and even deadly. Diesel engines were seldom used on the larger American ships of that era, and were not considered cost or energy efficient. The Empire State was a relatively quiet ship since she only used steam power to drive the turbines, which then spun the generators that made the electricity needed to energize the powerful electric motors, which were directly geared to turn the propeller shafts. All in all, the ship was nearly vibration free, making for a smooth ride.

The definition for the “Poop Deck” as found in nautical books would lead you to believe that the name was derived from the French word for the stern of the ship, la poupe which in turn was derived from the Latin puppis. On sailing ships this deck was higher than the main deck, making it ideal to navigate from. It also was where the binnacle and ship’s wheel were located for the helmsman. The deck of the poop deck formed the roof or overhead of the Captain’s cabin making it convenient for the Captain to reach. His after cabin was frequently irreverently referred to as the “poop cabin!” As wooden ships with iron men were replace with wooden men on iron ships, the navigational functions, with the exception of setting the sails, were moved to the bridge. According to my father who was a ship’s cook in the early 1920’s, the term poop deck remained, but took on a totally different meaning. During the turn of the last century, with coal fired reciprocating steam engines replacing wind and sails, this rear deck was where animals were kept to be butchered for food. Salted meat packed in barrels and the lack of fresh vegetables was the frequent cause of constipation and even worse scurvy. Many ships of that era, and before, didn’t yet have refrigeration and this was the way they continued to have fresh meat. A cabin boy tended to the chickens, pigs, lambs and goats and it was up to the butcher or cooks to slaughter and quarter them. Of course the deck nearest the stern was ideal for this, leaving the ensuing smell behind in the wake of the ship. Seldom is the term “Poop Deck” used now since with the advent of cruise ships nautical terms are fading. Bunks have become beds, cabins became staterooms and the head is now the restroom. Oh, what has become of the days of yore?

Do You Know How Search Engine Optimization Can Help You? In order to market your website and/or business effectively, you need to have the proper information to guide you along the way. Without the right info, you'll be swinging blindly in the most competitive marketplace in the world. Read the article below and find out about some tips you can use for optimizing your website. You will need to make your website pop up in the google search results. Build a really solid website and use search engine optimization to get it found. If other local businesses in your area don't have this, you will stand out like a shining star from the crowd. When it comes to linking your keywords, whether on your own site or on someone else's, quality beats quantity any day of the week. Make sure that your keywords are linked naturally in quality content. One proper, quality link will earn you much higher placement than 10 garbage links. Since web business is a marathon, it is good to plan around quality so that you last the long haul. To know where you stand with your particular niche market, you should check on your page rank at least once a week. By checking your rank, you will find out varying information about how competitors are finding you and you will also realize what you need to do in order to shoot up in the rankings. Your goal should be a page rank of 1. To search engine optimize your website, don't include more than 150 internal linking hyperlinks on your home page. Too many internal links on one page can dilute a web page's search engine rank. Huge numbers of links also make it hard for visitors to find the information that they need quickly. A great way to get more people to your site is to list your site with Google so that when people search through Google your page will come up. Listing your site in this way, will give you a vast venue where thousands of people will be introduced to your site and to your links. The future development strategy for all companies with a web site should include a strategy for search engine optimization, getting more traffic to their site. One key point is to be aware of the use of appropriate key words. Appropriate key words should be placed strategically throughout your site, the title tag and page header are generally the most important spots for keywords, be careful with your choices. Linking to lists is very popular for website owners and bloggers and can help your search engine optimization. You can find a lot of articles on the internet that are written as a top 10 list or top 100 list of tips or small facts. If possible, present well- written articles with relevant content composed as lists with numbers, not bullets, such as "10 ways to buy a new car." It's all about what the websites want in SEO, and that's what you need to realize. It doesn't matter if you're a simple blog or a legitimate business; you still need the proper optimization if you hope to achieve a high ranking. What you've read here will help you achieve that, but you still need to put the information to good use.

Last week,’ she says, ‘I was in the city, on my way to visit a wretched family I’d visited before, to plead with them once more to listen to the words of their Saviour. I was tired, I felt disinclined to walk far. Before I knew what I was doing, I was in the Underground Railway, pulled by an engine, mesmerised by the alternation of darkness and light, speeding through the earth at the cost of a sixpence. I spoke to no one; I might as well have been a ghost. I enjoyed it so much, I missed my stop, and never saw the family.’ ‘I… I confess I don’t quite divine the point you are making.’ ‘This is how our world will end, Henry! We’re foolish to imagine the Last Days will be ushered in by a giant Antichrist brandishing a bloody battle-axe. The Antichrist is our own desires, Henry. With my sixpence, I absolved myself utterly of responsibility – for the welfare of the poor filthy wretches who slaved to dig out that railway, for the grotesque sum of money spent on it, for the violation of the earth that ought to be solid beneath my feet. I sat in my carriage, admiring the dark tunnels flashing by me, not having the foggiest notion where I was, mindless of everything except my pleasure. I ceased to be, in any meaningful sense, God’s creature.’ ‘You are being hard on yourself. A single ride in the Underground isn’t going to hasten Armageddon.

Here is the story, which I have abridged (with acknowledgement to Sergey Parkhomenko, journalist and broadcaster, who reported it): The River Ob makes a turn at Kolpashevo, and every year it eats away a few feet of a sand cliff there. On April 30, 1979, the Ob's waters eroded another six-foot section of bank. Hanging from the newly exposed wall were the arms, legs and heads of people who had been buried there. A cemetery at least several yards wide had been exposed. The bodies had been packed in and layered tightly. Some of the skulls from the uppermost layer rolled out from the sandbank, and little boys picked them up and began playing with them. News of the burial spread quickly and people started gathering at the sandbank. The police and neighbourhood watch volunteers quickly cordoned off the whole thing. Shortly afterwards, they built a thick fence around the crumbling sandbank, warning people away. The next day, the Communist Party called meeting in the town, explaining that those buried were traitors and deserters from the war. But the explanation wasn't entirely convincing. If this were so, why was everyone dressed in civilian clothes? Why had women and children been executed as well? And from where, for that matter, did so many deserters come in a town of just 20,000 people? Meanwhile, the river continued to eat away at the bank and it became clear that the burial site was enormous; thousands were buried there. People could remember that there used to be a prison on these grounds in the late 1930s. It was general knowledge that there were executions there, but nobody could imagine just how many people were shot. The perimeter fence and barbed wire had long ago been dismantled, and the prison itself was closed down. But what the town's people didn't know was that Kolpashevo's prison operated a fully-fledged assembly line of death. There was a special wooden trough, down which a person would descend to the edge of a ditch. There, he'd be killed by rifle fire, the shooter sitting in a special booth. If necessary, he'd be finished off with a second shot from a pistol, before being added to the next layer of bodies, laid head-to-toe with the last corpse. Then they'd sprinkle him lightly with lime. When the pit was full, they filled in the hole with sand and moved the trough over a few feet to the side, and began again. But now the crimes of the past were being revealed as bodies fell into the water and drifted past the town while people watched from the shore. In Tomsk, the authorities decided to get rid of the burial site and remove the bodies. The task, it turned out, wasn't so easy. Using heavy equipment so near a collapsing sandbank wasn't wise and there was no time to dig up all the bodies by hand. The Soviet leadership was in a hurry. Then from Tomsk came new orders: two powerful tugboats were sent up the Ob, right up to the riverbank, where they were tied with ropes to the shore, facing away from the bank. Then they set their engines on full throttle. The wash from the ships' propellers quickly eroded the soft riverbank and bodies started falling into the water, where most of them were cut to pieces by the propellers. But some of the bodies escaped and floated away downstream. So motorboats were stationed there where men hooked the bodies as they floated by. A barge loaded with scrap metal from a nearby factory was moored near the boats and the men were told to tie pieces of scrap metal to the bodies with wire and sink them in the deepest part of the river. The last team, also composed of local men from the town, worked a bit further downstream where they collected any bodies that had got past the boats and buried them on shore in unmarked graves or sank them by tying the bodies to stones. This cleanup lasted almost until the end of the summer.

Alfie is the goon in the team: think of Scooby-Doo with the brains of Homer Simpson. People often can’t believe he’s a collie because he is as smooth as a piglet and built like a lurcher with long legs and a deep chest. He is a true athlete and can run for miles and miles without tiring. Dog owners call it ‘having a good engine.’ He is obedient to the last – but sometimes ‘obedient’ can be another word for ‘stupid.’ If I ask him to lie down and get side-tracked, he will stay glued to the very spot until eventually I come looking for him ten minutes later. I would take sheep out the same gate every day for a week and on day seven Alfie would still need to be told what to do. But he is a great work dog and very honest, and no matter what situation he gets into he is always listening for my commands and has full faith that I will not see him wrong.

CHAPTER 12 The Engineers In this chapter, I describe the engineering role (also commonly known as developers or, in some circles, programmers). But as with the last chapter, I'm not trying to speak here to the engineers—I'm aiming this discussion at product managers who need to learn how to work effectively with engineers. There's probably no more important relationship for a successful product manager than the one with your engineers. If your relationship is strong, with mutual and sincere respect both ways, then the product manager job is great. If your relationship is not strong, your days as product manager will be brutal (and probably numbered). Therefore, this is a relationship worth taking very seriously and doing everything you can to nurture. This strong relationship begins with you.

In the general desolation, amidst the rubble, Rask was the only man standing. And he stood taller than ever, since most of the other speculators’ losses had been his gain. He had always benefited from chaos and turmoil, as his masterful operations during the ticker delays repeatedly had proven, but what happened over the last months of 1929 had no precedent. Once this picture became clear enough, the public was quick to react. It had been Rask who engineered the whole crash to begin with, people said. Slyly, he had whetted a reckless appetite for debts he knew all along could never be honored. Subtly, he had been dumping his stocks and driving the market down. Artfully, he had leaked rumors and stoked paranoia. Mercilessly, he had overthrown Wall Street and kept it under his thumb with his selling spree the day right before Black Thursday. Everything—the breaks in the market, the uncertainty, the bearishness leading to panic selling, and eventually the crash that would ruin multitudes—had been orchestrated by Rask. His was the hand behind the invisible hand.

In the room where the signing [of the surrender] was to take place the sole decorations were three flags upon the end wall: the Red Flag, the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes. The French colours were nowhere to be seen. De Tassigny declared that France could not be represented at the ceremony without her flag alongside those of her Allies. But where could a French flag to be found? The Russians decided to make one, with a piece of red stuff taken from a former Hitlerite banner, a white sheet and a piece of blue serge cut out of an engineer's overalls. Alas! Our tricolor was less familiar to the young Russian girls than the red flag to many French girls, for when a jeep brought along the flag that had been run op in this way we found a magnificient Dutch flag: the blue, white and red had been sewn not one beside the other but one above the other!

Last week I sat through a day of environmental talks. You know what I remember from that entire day? Only one thing-the story a guy told about how he was sitting on an airplane and the lady next to him asked for cream for her coffee, but when they brought her the small plastic containers of cream, she said, "No thanks; the plastic isn't biodegradable." And he thought to himself, "I can hardly hear her over the jet engines that are burning up fifty gazillion barrels of fuel a minute, and she's worried about a thimble-sized piece of plastic?" That's all I remember from that day. Why is that? It's the power of a well-told story that is also very specific. Stories that are full of vague generalizations are weak. Specifics give them strength.

On February 8, 1928, known as Lindbergh day since it was the day he crossed the Atlantic Ocean the year before, Charles A. Lindbergh landed at the Campo Columbia airfield near Havana. Lindbergh had visited many countries in his plane, and he had the national flags of each country painted in the fuselage. Having flown from Haiti, on a Goodwill Tour of the Caribbean in his "Spirit of St. Louis," he had the Cuban flag painted on his a single-engine Ryan monoplane. It was the last country he visited before he donated the “Spirit of St. Louis" to the Smithsonian Institution, where it is still exhibited at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

My teeth clatter in my mouth as everything ripples and shudders in the storm of shells, whining, whizzing. The kid on the bicycle rolls out of sight. Untouched. A miracle. A dream. The shells abruptly cease and there is only the settling creak of the car seat, a scatter of twittering birds in the shrubs and trees. I could use some gum. Where do you buy gum so early besides the service station? It seems wrong to go there since we don't need any gasoline. We don't drive enough. A tank of gas lasts us forever. I get behind the wheel and in the mirror I can see my eyelids fluttering. I sit squeezing the steering wheel until I realize I haven't started the engine. The garage conceals me. I don't want to go out into the open. A horse whinnys – are they bringing up the artillery? It's the farm field where old Wallam tills a little garden, his yard is the biggest and runs alongside the back of ours to the farm where his family has their orchards. What's wrong with me? Sounds of explosions, bullets, voices of men. Volleys. I smell smoke. Burning things, festering ruptured corpses with maggots pulsing under horrible skin and the shells, the horse, it's hit, it shrieks, explodes apart – can we pull the gun by hand? The crew is dead too, bullets are making their bodies jump even after they have broken apart like smashed holiday nuts. I want to scream. Maybe I am? I begin breathing rapidly. I don't know how long I am there but I hear the screen door open and I key the ignition. “Car troubles?” Mr. Kincaid calls out to me from the front porch. “No troubles,” I say setting my arm out the window and holding the mirror to keep my hand steady. “Lovely day.” The sun was really rising, taking the temperature up with it, hot shards of searing light coming over the treetops to stab at everything that couldn't find the shade. I couldn't find the shade.

When two figures emerged, Denny winced. What on earth was Mr. Jones doing with that loser? Marty was trotting happily alongside the pair. “Some judge of character he is,” Denny mumbled to herself. Mr. Jones waved. “Denny,” he said. “Come here. I want you to meet my new hired hand.” Denny’s mouth fell open and she stood motionless as the two approached. Spence grinned at her in his aggravating, superior way. “Well, if it isn’t Miss High and Mighty from New Yawk.” “You know each other?” said Mr. Jones. “We’ve met,” said Denny shortly, then she turned and stomped off toward the boat. She watched from the cabin as the two circled the Misty Day, talking and gesturing; then Spence went back toward the engine shack and Mr. Jones made his way slowly up the ladder. “Are you crazy?” Denny asked him as soon as he stepped into the cabin. Mr. Jones smiled. “Some people seem to think so,” he said. “I mean it,” said Denny, in no mood for jokes. “That kid is the biggest jerk in the whole school. He’s probably into drugs and everything else.” Mr. Jones shrugged. “Seems like an okay kid to me,” he said. “Besides, he knows engines.” “So do you,” said Denny. “We could have fixed the railway ourselves.

They had to park the Jeep, load the engine parts into the dinghy, and row across the bar, so by the time they reached the Misty Day Spence was already there, leaning against the cradle, puffing on a cigarette. Mr. Jones frowned when he saw him. “How old are you?” he asked. “Sixteen,” said Spence. “Why?” “Do you know what your lungs are going to look like by the time you’re fifty?” Spence shrugged, then nodded toward the ever-present pipe that hung from Mr. Jones’s lip. “No worse than yours, I guess,” he said. Mr. Jones looked puzzled. “He means your pipe,” Denny prompted. “Yeah,” said Spence, “and don’t give me any of that crap about a pipe being not as bad as a cigarette. They’re all the same.” Mr. Jones took his pipe out of his mouth and looked at it thoughtfully. “You know,” he said, “you’ve got a point there. Kind of like the pot calling the kettle black, isn’t it?” Spence nodded. “Tell you what I’m going to do,” said Mr. Jones. “I’ll make you a little wager. I’ll bet I can give up smoking my pipe if you can give up your cigarettes.” Denny bit her lip to keep from smiling. Spence took another drag on his cigarette and stared at Mr. Jones skeptically. “Of course, if you don’t think you’ve got the willpower,” said Mr. Jones. Spence dropped his cigarette and crushed it into the ground. “I can quit anytime I want,” he said, then looked up. “But I don’t want to.” “Oh, sure,” said Denny. “That’s what they all say.” Spence looked at her and narrowed her eyes. “Who asked you?” he said. “You just don’t think you can do it,” Denny went on. “You’re afraid Mr. Jones is gonna show you up.” “Oh, yeah?” said Spence. He pulled his cigarettes out of his jacket pocket, smiled wryly at Denny, and tossed them basketball style into Mr. Jones’s trash barrel, then reached a hand out to Mr. Jones. “You got a deal, old man,” he said. Mr. Jones shook his hand and nodded, then stuck the pipe back in his mouth. “You don’t mind if I just kind of let it hang here, do you, for old times’ sake?” Spence shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said, “as long as you don’t light up.” “I’m a man of my word,” said Mr. Jones. “No flame will ever touch this pipe again.” Spence nodded and stalked off toward the shed. Denny giggled. “You’re awful,” she said. Mr. Jones winked. “What’s awful?” he said. “I’m doing him a favor.

Where are you going, Albert?” Albert said nothing. How rare, Quinn thought: Albert speechless. “Not really your concern, Quinn,” Albert said finally. “You’re running out.” Albert sighed. To his three companions he said, “Go ahead and get in the boat. The Boston Whaler. Yes, that one.” Turning back to Quinn he said, “It’s been good doing business with you. If you want, you can come with us. We have room for one more. You’re a good guy.” “And my crews?” “Limited resources, Quinn.” Quinn laughed a little. “You’re a piece of work, aren’t you, Albert?” Albert didn’t seem bothered. “I’m a businessman. It’s about making a profit and surviving. It so happens that I’ve kept everyone alive for months. So I guess I’m sorry if you don’t like me, Quinn, but what’s coming next isn’t about business. What’s coming next is craziness. We’re going back to the days of starvation. But in the dark this time. Craziness. Madness.” His eyes glinted when he said that last word. Quinn saw the fear there. Madness. Yes, that would terrify the eternally rational businessman. “All that happens if I stay,” Albert continued, “is that someone decides to kill me. I’ve already come too close to being dead once.” “Albert, you’re a leader. You’re an organizer. We’re going to need that.” Albert waved an impatient hand and glanced over to see that the Boston Whaler was ready. “Caine’s a leader. Sam’s a leader. Me?” Albert considered it for a second and shook the idea off. “No. I’m important, but I’m not a leader. Tell you what, though, Quinn: in my absence you speak for me. If that helps, good for you.” Albert climbed down into the Boston Whaler. Pug started the engine and Leslie-Ann cast off the ropes. Some of the last gasoline in Perdido Beach sent the boat chugging out of the marina. “Hey, Quinn!” Albert shouted back. “Don’t come to the island without showing a white flag. I don’t want to blow you up!

I decided to skip it and head to the library to do some research on Keepers. The place was practically deserted at this time of day, giving me my pick of computer terminals. I sat down at one in the corner and woke up the screen with a push of the mouse. A pop-up box with a smiley face and the words “Hello, student!” immediately displayed on the screen. The animation phenomenon was particularly prevalent in the library. I gritted my teeth and contemplated switching to another terminal in the hopes that it would be less lively than this one, but decided it wasn’t worth the time. None of the computers in here were new. In the text box below the greeting I typed “hi thanks” and pressed enter. The pop-up disappeared, giving me access to the library’s custom search engine. I typed “keeper” and “ring” in the box and pressed the search button. Another pop-up appeared on the screen: “Are you sure you want to search for that?” “Yes,” I typed. “Lots of people aren’t, you know, sure.” The smile on the smiley face widened. “I’m sure.” “Sure, sure?” “YES!!!” I pounded on the keys, trying to get the point across. The smiley face frowned. “Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.” At last, the stupid thing displayed the results, and I sighed in relief.

All My Friends That's how it starts We go back to your house We check the charts And start to figure it out And if it's crowded, all the better Because we know we're gonna be up late But if you're worried about the weather Then you picked the wrong place to stay That's how it starts And so it starts You switch the engine on We set controls for the heart of the sun One of the ways we show our age And if the sun comes up, if the sun comes up, if the sun comes up And I still don't wanna stagger home Then it's the memory of our betters That are keeping us on our feet You spent the first five years trying to get with the plan And the next five years trying to be with your friends again You're talking 45 turns just as fast as you can Teah, I know it gets tired, but it's better when we pretend It comes apart The way it does in bad films Except in parts When the moral kicks in Though when we're running out of the drugs And the conversation's winding away I wouldn't trade one stupid decision For another five years of life You drop the first ten years just as fast as you can And the next ten people who are trying to be polite When you're blowing eighty-five days in the middle of France Yeah, I know it gets tired only where are your friends tonight? And to tell the truth Oh, this could be the last time So here we go Like a sales force into the night And if I made a fool, if I made a fool, if I made a fool On the road, there's always this And if I'm sewn into submission I can still come home to this And with a face like a dad and a laughable stand You can sleep on the plane or review what you said When you're drunk and the kids leave impossible tasks You think over and over, "hey, I'm finally dead." Oh, if the trip and the plan come apart in your hand Tou look contorted on yourself your ridiculous prop You forgot what you meant when you read what you said And you always knew you were tired, but then Where are your friends tonight? Where are your friends tonight? Where are your friends tonight? If I could see all my friends tonight If I could see all my friends tonight If I could see all my friends tonight If I could see all my friends tonight

BEHIND THE WALL The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, twenty-five years ago this month, but the first attempts to breach it came immediately after it went up, just past midnight on August 13, 1961. The East German regime had been secretly stockpiling barbed wire and wooden sawhorses, which the police, who learned of their mission only that night, hastily assembled into a barrier. For many Berliners, the first sign that a historic turn had been taken was when the U-Bahn, the city’s subway, stopped running on certain routes, leaving late-night passengers to walk home through streets that were suddenly filled with soldiers. As realization set in, so did a sense of panic. By noon the next day, as Ann Tusa recounts in “The Last Division,” people were trying to pull down the barbed wire with their hands. Some succeeded, in scattered places, and a car drove through a section of the Wall to the other side. In the following weeks, the authorities began reinforcing it. Within a year, the Wall was nearly eight feet high, with patrols and the beginnings of a no man’s land. But it still wasn’t too tall for a person to scale, and on August 17, 1962, Peter Fechter, who was eighteen years old, and his friend Helmut Kulbeik decided to try. They picked a spot on Zimmerstrasse, near the American Checkpoint Charlie, and just after two o’clock in the afternoon they made a run for it. Kulbeik got over, but Fechter was shot by a guard, and fell to the ground. He was easily visible from the West; there are photographs of him, taken as he lay calling for help. Hundreds of people gathered on the Western side, shouting for someone to save him. The East German police didn’t want to, and the Americans had been told that if they crossed the border they might start a war. Someone tossed a first-aid kit over the Wall, but Fechter was too weak to pick it up. After an hour, he bled to death. Riots broke out in West Berlin, and many asked angrily why the Americans had let Fechter die. He was hardly more than a child, and he wanted to be a free man. It’s a fair question, though one can imagine actions taken that day which could have led to a broader confrontation. It was not a moment to risk grand gestures; Fechter died two months before the Cuban missile crisis. (When the Wall went up, John F. Kennedy told his aides that it was “not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”) And there was something off key about Germans, so soon after the end of the Second World War, railing about others being craven bystanders. Some observers came to see the Wall as the necessary scaffolding on which to secure a postwar peace. That’s easy to say, though, when one is on the side with the department stores, and without the secret police. Technically, West Berlin was the city being walled in, a quasi-metropolis detached from the rest of West Germany. The Allied victors—America, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—had divided Germany into four parts, and, since Berlin was in the Soviet sector, they divided the city into four parts, too. In 1948, the Soviets cut off most road and rail access to the city’s three western sectors, in an effort to assert their authority. The Americans responded with the Berlin Airlift, sending in planes carrying food and coal, and so much salt that their engines began to corrode. By the time the Wall went up, it wasn’t the West Berliners who were hungry. West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder , or economic miracle, was under way, while life in the East involved interminable shortages. West Berliners were surrounded by Soviet military encampments, but they were free and they could leave—and so could anyone who could get to their part of the city. The East Berliners were the prisoners. In the weeks before the Wall went up, more than a thousand managed to cross the border each day; the Wall was built to keep them from leaving. But people never stopped trying to tear it down.

Mr. Bear and Mr. Rabbit didn’t like each other very much. One day, while walking through the woods, they came across a golden frog. They were amazed when the frog talked to them. The golden frog admitted that he didn’t often meet anyone, but when he did, he always gave them six wishes. He told the bear and the rabbit that they could have three wishes each. Mr. Bear immediately wished that all the other bears in the forest were females. The frog granted his wish. Mr. Rabbit, after thinking for a while, wished for a crash helmet. One appeared immediately, and he placed it on his head. Mr. Bear was amazed at Mr. Rabbit’s wish, but carried on with his second wish, which was that all the bears in the neighboring forests were females as well. The frog granted his wish. Mr. Rabbit then wished for a motorcycle. It appeared before him, and he climbed on board and started revving the engine. Mr. Bear complained that Mr. Rabbit had wasted two wishes that he could have had for himself. Shaking his head, Mr. Bear made his final wish, that all the other bears in the world were females as well, making him the only male bear in the world. “So let it be done,” said the frog. At that point they both turned to Mr. Rabbit, curious as to what his last wish might be. Mr. Rabbit revved the engine, thought for a second, then said, “I wish that Mr. Bear was gay!” and he rode off as fast as he could!

His last encounter with Wendy... Hell, she'd been the one to hurt his feelings. The best sex of his life, and she'd kicked him out as soon as it was over, told him not to bother with calling because it was strictly a one-time thing. Told him, actually, while he'd still been inside her. He groaned at the memory as he slipped behind the wheel, turning on the heat the second he had the engine started. His day was shaping up to be an ass kicker. Which was saying something, considering that the day before included his arrest, a concussion, and a near drowning.

One of the more useful things I learned as a midshipman at Maine Maritime Academy were the names of the seven masts of a seven masted schooner. When I mentioned to the 600 people in attendance at a Homecoming event that my degree was a BS in Marlinspike Seamanship no one laughed, leaving me in the embarrassing position of having to explain that actually I had a Bachelor of Marine Science degree. Later looking into a mirror I convinced myself that I really didn’t look old enough to have lived in an era when wooden ships were sailed by iron men. What I remembered was that we were wooden men sailing on iron ships that were actually made of steel, however I can remember schooners sailing along the coast of New England and I do remember the seven names of a seven masted schooner. In actual fact only one seven masted schooner was ever built and she was the she a 475 foot, steel hulled wind driven collier/tanker named the Thomas W. Lawson, named after a Boston millionaire, stock-broker, book author, and President of the Boston Bay State Gas Co. Launched in 1902 she held the distinction of being the largest pure sail ship ever built. Originally the names of the masts were the foremast, mainmast, mizzenmast, spanker, jigger, driver, and pusher. Later the spanker became the kicker and the spanker moved to next to last place, with the pusher becoming the after mast. Depending on whom you talked to, the names and their order drifted around and a lot of different naming systems were formed. Some systems used numbers and others the days of the week, however there are very few, if any of the iron men left to dispute what the masts were called. The Thomas W. Lawson had two steam winches and smaller electrically driven winches, to raise and lower her huge sails. The electricity was provided by a generator, driven by what was termed a donkey engine. On November 20, 1907 the large 475 foot schooner sailed for England. Experiencing stormy weather she passed inside of the Bishop Rock lighthouse and attempted to anchor. That night both anchor chains broke, causing the ship to smash against Shag Rock near Annet. The schooner, pounded by heavy seas capsized and sank. Of the 19 souls aboard Captain George W. Dow and the ships engineer Edward L. Rowe were the only survivors. Everyone else, including the pilot, drown and were buried in a mass grave in St Agnes cemetery.

I believe every day should begin and end with gratitude. I practice it every day in my morning meditation. Each morning, focusing on the reverse gap, I think of five things I’m grateful for in my personal life. Then I think of five things I’m grateful for in my work and career. A typical list might look like this: PERSONAL LIFE 1.​My daughter, Eve, and her beautiful smiles 2.​The happiness I felt last night relaxing with a glass of red wine and watching Sherlock on BBC 3.​My wife and life partner 4.​The time I spent with my son building his newest Lego Star Wars creation 5.​The wonderful cup of gourmet coffee my publicist, Tania, left on my desk WORK LIFE 1.​My leadership team and the amazing talent they bring to our company 2.​A particularly great letter we received for my online course Consciousness Engineering 3.​The incredibly fun Culture Day we had in the office yesterday 4.​The fact that plans are coming together to hold our upcoming A-Fest at another amazing location 5.​Having coworkers who are friends and who greet me with hugs when I come to the office This entire practice takes me no more than ninety seconds. But it’s perhaps one of the most important and powerful ninety seconds I can spend each day.

What do you do when you can’t go on, Monsieur Perdu?” he asked wearily. “Me? Nothing.” Next to nothing. I take night walks through Paris until I’m tired. I clean Lulu’s engine, the hull and the windows, and I keep the boat ready to go, right down to the last screw, even though it hasn’t gone anywhere in two decades. I read books—twenty at a time. Everywhere: on the toilet, in the kitchen, in cafés, on the metro. I do jigsaw puzzles that take up the whole floor, destroy them when I’ve finished and then start all over again. I feed stray cats. I arrange my groceries in alphabetical order. I sometimes take sleeping tablets. I take a dose of Rilke to wake up. I don’t read any books in which women like —— crop up. I gradually turn to stone. I carry on. The same every day. That’s the only way I can survive. But other than that, no, I do nothing. Perdu

The Jeep was parked at the beginning of the causeway when Denny got off the bus. She ignored it and started toward the island. “Denise . . .” Denny ignored Mr. Jones’s call and kept on walking. She heard the engine start, and soon the Jeep was rolling along beside her. “Picked up your mail,” said Mr. Jones. He handed some envelopes out the window. Denny grabbed them without a word. “There’s a letter there from some old coot named Jones,” Mr. Jones said. “Looks like an apology.” Denny looked down and ruffled through the envelopes. “There is not,” she said. “No?” said Mr. Jones sheepishly. “Well, there should be. Guess he didn’t get around to writing it. He feels real bad though. I know that for a fact.” Denny stopped and put her hand on her hip and stared at Mr. Jones.

Schwieger ordered the submarine to the bottom so his crew could dine in peace. “And now,” said Zentner, “there was fresh fish, fried in butter, grilled in butter, sautéed in butter, all that we could eat.” These fish and their residual odors, however, could only have worsened the single most unpleasant aspect of U-boat life: the air within the boat. First there was the basal reek of three dozen men who never bathed, wore leather clothes that did not breathe, and shared one small lavatory. The toilet from time to time imparted to the boat the scent of a cholera hospital and could be flushed only when the U-boat was on the surface or at shallow depths, lest the undersea pressure blow material back into the vessel. This tended to happen to novice officers and crew, and was called a “U-boat baptism.” The odor of diesel fuel infiltrated all corners of the boat, ensuring that every cup of cocoa and piece of bread tasted of oil. Then came the fragrances that emanated from the kitchen long after meals were cooked, most notably that close cousin to male body odor, day-old fried onions. All this was made worse by a phenomenon unique to submarines that occurred while they were submerged. U-boats carried only limited amounts of oxygen, in cylinders, which injected air into the boat in a ratio that varied depending on the number of men aboard. Expended air was circulated over a potassium compound to cleanse it of carbonic acid, then reinjected into the boat’s atmosphere. Off-duty crew were encouraged to sleep because sleeping men consumed less oxygen. When deep underwater, the boat developed an interior atmosphere akin to that of a tropical swamp. The air became humid and dense to an unpleasant degree, this caused by the fact that heat generated by the men and by the still-hot diesel engines and the boat’s electrical apparatus warmed the hull. As the boat descended through ever colder waters, the contrast between the warm interior and cold exterior caused condensation, which soaked clothing and bred colonies of mold. Submarine crews called it “U-boat sweat.” It drew oil from the atmosphere and deposited it in coffee and soup, leaving a miniature oil slick. The longer the boat stayed submerged, the worse conditions became. Temperatures within could rise to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. “You can have no conception of the atmosphere that is evolved by degrees under these circumstances,” wrote one commander, Paul Koenig, “nor of the hellish temperature which brews within the shell of steel.

I had two great passions at the time: one magical and ethereal, which was reading, and the other mundane and predictable, which was pursuing silly love affairs. Concerning my literary ambitions, my successes went from slender to nonexistent. During those years I started a hundred woefully bad novels that died along the way, hundreds of short stories, plays, radio serials, and even poems that I wouldn't let anyone read, for their own good. I only needed to read them myself to see how much I still had to learn and what little progress I was making, despite the desire and enthusiasm I put into it. I was forever rereading Carax's novels and those of countless authors I borrowed from my parent's bookshop. I tried to pull them apart as if they were transistor radios, or the engine of a Rolls-Royce, hoping I would be able to figure out how they were built and how and why they worked. I'd read something in a newspaper about some Japanese engineers who practiced something called reverse engineering. Apparently these industrious gentlemen disassembled an engine to its last piece, analyzing the function of each bit, the dynamics of the whole, and the interior design of the device to work out the mathematics that supported its operation. My mother had a brother who worked as an engineer in Germany, so I told myself that there must be something in my genes that would allow me to do the same thing with a book or with a story. Every day I became more convinced that good literature has little or nothing to do with trivial fancies such as 'inspiration' or 'having something to tell' and more with the engineering of language, with the architecture of the narrative, with the painting of textures, with the timbres and colors of the staging, with the cinematography of words, and the music that can be produced by an orchestra of ideas. My second great occupation, or I should say my first, was far more suited to comedy, and at times touched on farce. There was a time in which I fell in love on a weekly basis, something that, in hindsight, I don't recommend. I fell in love with a look, a voice, and above all with what was tightly concealed under those fine-wool dresses worn by the young girls of my time. 'That isn't love, it's a fever,' Fermín would specify. 'At your age it is chemically impossible to tell the difference. Mother Nature brings on these tricks to repopulate the planet by injecting hormones and a raft of idiocies into young people's veins so there's enough cannon fodder available for them to reproduce like rabbits and at the same time sacrifice themselves in the name of whatever is parroted by bankers, clerics, and revolutionary visionaries in dire need of idealists, imbeciles, and other plagues that will prevent the world from evolving and make sure it always stays the same.

Where you may say, “I finally got my oil changed,” Turbo would say, “The day started with a dark cloud hovering over my rumbling vehicle. The check engine light flickered multiple times, but it never stayed on full. I knew something was amiss so I drove to town, only to get caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Time felt like it stopped. People were honking their horns and two men had stepped out of their cars to settle a dispute regarding the right to merge at the last second. The small guy won. The cops showed up and I got to the shop thirty minutes later. They checked every aspect of my car until finally determining that I needed an oil change.” I

In the background, given my commitment to the outer ecology of environmentalism, I replaced all the company cars with diesels, which used less crude oil and lasted longer than gasoline engines. The diesel cars did pay off briefly during the Second Energy Crisis of 1979, but they gave us a lot of trouble in the long run because the diesel-powered Oldsmobile station wagons that General Motors rushed into production had nothing but a beefed-up gasoline engine (internal pressures are much greater in a diesel) and they were in the shop more often than on the road. We aggressively redesigned the stores to conserve energy. To this day, Trader Joe’s stores don’t have very many windows, and all panes of glass are very small, an idea that had an accidental payoff in every subsequent earthquake and riot. As the young lady said back there in the God of Fair Beginnings chapter, I did the right thing for the wrong reasons.

You need to go out of your way to make this happen, but it only need be a small gesture. A brief one-on-one moment where you acknowledge this person is relevant. More than a fly-by “bye” on your last day. Less than a tearful hug in the hallway.

AKKA MAHADEVI Around nine hundred years ago in southern India, there lived a female mystic called Akka Mahadevi. Akka was a devotee of Shiva. Ever since her childhood, she had regarded Shiva as her beloved, her husband. It was not just a belief; for her it was a living reality. The king saw this beautiful young woman one day, and decided he wanted her as his wife. She refused. But the king was adamant and threatened her parents, so she yielded. She married the man, but she kept him at a physical distance. He tried to woo her, but her constant refrain was, “Shiva is my husband.” Time passed and the king’s patience wore thin. Infuriated, he tried to lay his hands upon her. She refused. “I have another husband. His name is Shiva. He visits me, and I am with him. I cannot be with you.” Because she claimed to have another husband, she was brought to court for prosecution. Akka is said to have announced to all present, “Being a queen doesn’t mean a thing to me. I will leave.” When the king saw the ease with which she was walking away from everything, he made a last futile effort to salvage his dignity. He said, “Everything on your person—your jewels, your garments—belongs to me. Leave it all here and go.” So, in the full assembly, Akka just dropped her jewelry, all her clothes, and walked away naked. From that day on, she refused to wear clothes even though many tried to convince her otherwise. It was unbelievable for a woman to be walking naked on the streets of India at the time—and this was a beautiful young woman. She lived out her life as a wandering mendicant and composed some exquisite poetry that lives on to this very day. In a poem (translated by A. K. Ramanujan), she says: People, male and female, blush when a cloth covering their shame comes loose. When the lord of lives lives drowned without a face in the world, how can you be modest? When all the world is the eye of the lord, onlooking everywhere, what can you cover and conceal? Devotees of this kind may be in this world but not of it. The power and passion with which they lived their lives make them inspirations for generations of humanity. Akka continues to be a living presence in the Indian collective consciousness, and her lyrical poems remain among the most prized works of South Indian literature to this very day. Embracing

Hello, listen, I’m on a field phone, do not speak until I say “over.” Repeat, don’t talk until I say “over.” Over. Do you understand, or was your silence intentional? Over. Northwest of The Seven Sisters, in a sort of bunker on stilts. Over. Last week I called in a cobra of smoke. I was packing my gear in a panic, when the next tower west confirmed it was only low cloud. Over. I get a crackling out of Alaska that sounds religious. Vladivostok. CBC. I’ve decided I like Paganini. Over. No, leave it, or throw it out, I won’t need it here. If ever. Over. When storms wander across the lower jaw of the coastal range, unloading their cargo here, it’s like being in the engine room of something metallic and massive. Over. My first grizzly passed within a stone’s throw, followed an hour later by the sucking thumps of a Parks chopper. Nothing since. Over. Days, I rearrange stones shoaled up at the base of the uprights and struts. Nights, I stab at imagining anything lovely, but end up laughing. Over. The forest goes quiet as if waiting for me to finish. Listens hard to whatever isn’t itself. Makes me anxious. I think of how we ever came to . . . [inaudible] given the arm’s length I kept joy at. Over. Affection stung like a rasp drawn over [inaudible]. I thinned the world of it. Don’t live as I did. Allow for terms of relief. The black maples aligned along streets, waddling skunks, their dark dusters through the foxglove, your shoulder bag, shoes, the faces of strangers; all may strike you as fibres of a tremendous sadness. That’s you in among the weave of it, new. Over. Is that important? I’ve been contracted to watch this horizon and will be here until something happens. Over. Tell them it will. Over.

There is a wonderful story of a group of American car executives who went to Japan to see a Japanese assembly line. At the end of the line, the doors were put on the hinges, the same as in America. But something was missing. In the United States, a line worker would take a rubber mallet and tap the edges of the door to ensure that it fit perfectly. In Japan, that job didn’t seem to exist. Confused, the American auto executives asked at what point they made sure the door fit perfectly. Their Japanese guide looked at them and smiled sheepishly. “We make sure it fits when we design it.” In the Japanese auto plant, they didn’t examine the problem and accumulate data to figure out the best solution—they engineered the outcome they wanted from the beginning. If they didn’t achieve their desired outcome, they understood it was because of a decision they made at the start of the process. At the end of the day, the doors on the American-made and Japanese-made cars appeared to fit when each rolled off the assembly line. Except the Japanese didn’t need to employ someone to hammer doors, nor did they need to buy any mallets. More importantly, the Japanese doors are likely to last longer and maybe even be more structurally sound in an accident. All this for no other reason than they ensured the pieces fit from the start. What the American automakers did with their rubber mallets is a metaphor for how so many people and organizations lead. When faced with a result that doesn’t go according to plan, a series of perfectly effective short-term tactics are used until the desired outcome is achieved. But how structurally sound are those solutions? So many organizations function in a world of tangible goals and the mallets to achieve them. The ones that achieve more, the ones that get more out of fewer people and fewer resources, the ones with an outsized amount of influence, however, build products and companies and even recruit people that all fit based on the original intention. Even though the outcome may look the same, great leaders understand the value in the things we cannot see. Every instruction we give, every course of action we set, every result we desire, starts with the same thing: a decision. There are those who decide to manipulate the door to fit to achieve the desired result and there are those who start from somewhere very different. Though both courses of action may yield similar short-term results, it is what we can’t see that makes long-term success more predictable for only one. The one that understood why the doors need to fit by design and not by default.

And she got the feeling that Boots Smith's relationship to this swiftly moving car was no ordinary one. He wasn't just a black man driving a car at a pell-mell pace. He had lost all sense of time and space as the car plunged forward into the cold, white night. The act of driving the car made him feel he was a powerful being who could conquer the world. Up over hills, fast down on the other side. It was like playing god and commanding everything within hearing to awaken and listen to him. The people sleeping in the white farmhouses were at the mercy of the sound of his engine roaring past in the night. It brought them half-awake—disturbed, uneasy. The cattle in the barns moved in protest, the chickens stirred on their roosts and before any of them could analyze the sound that had alarmed them, he was gone—on and on into the night. And she knew, too, that this was the reason white people turned scornfully to look at Negroes who swooped past them on the highways. 'Crazy niggers with autos' in the way they looked. Because they sensed that the black men had to roar past them, had for a brief moment to feel equal, feel superior; had to take reckless chances going around curves, passing on hills, so that they would be better able to face a world that took pains to make them feel that they didn't belong, that they were inferior. Because in that one moment of passing a white man in a car they could feel good and the good feeling would last long enough so that they could hold their heads up the next day and the day after that. And the white people in the cars hated it because—and her mind stumbled over the thought and then went on—because possibly they, too, needed to go on feeling superior. Because if they didn't, it upset the delicate balance of the world they moved in when they could see for themselves that a black man in a ratclap car could overtake and pass them on a hill. Because if there was nothing left for them but that business of feeling superior to black people, and that was taken away even for the split second of one car going ahead of another, it left them with nothing.

Time passed fast and I was coming out from the reputed engineering college at last after the same Professor had intervened with the college authority for holding the examination in spite of political troubles, prevailing during seventies in Calcutta. The sprawling complex of the university would suddenly vanish from my view. I would be missing the chirping of the birds in early morning, view of green grass of the football field right in front of our building, badly mauled by the students and pedestrians who used to cut short their journey moving across the field, whistling of steam trains passing parallel to the backside of boundary wall of our building, stentorian voice of our Professors, ever smiling and refreshing faces of the learned Professors every day. I would definitely miss the opportunity of gossiping on a bench by the lake side with other students, not to speak of your girlfriend with whom you would try to be cozy with to keep yourself warm when the chilling breeze, which put roses in girls’ cheeks but made sinuses ache, cut across you in its journey towards the open field during winter. The charm of walking along the lonely streets proscribed for outsiders and bowing occasionally when you meet the Professors of repute, music and band for the generation of ear deafening sound - both symphony and cacophony, on Saturdays and Sundays in the auditorium, rhythmic sound of machines in the workshop, hurly-burly of laughter of my friends, talks, cries at the top of  their lunges in the canteen and sudden departures of all from the canteen on hearing the ding-dong sound of the big bell hung in the administration building indicating the end of the period would no longer be there. The street fighting of two groups of students on flimsy grounds and passionate speeches of the students during debate competition would no longer be audible. Shaking of long thin pine trees violently by the storm flowing across these especially during summer, shouting and gesticulation of students’ union members while moving around the campus for better amenities or administration, getting caught with friends all around with revolvers in hand during the violent Naxalite movement, hiding in the toilet in canteen to avoid beating by police personnel, dropping of mangoes from a mango tree which spread its wings in all directions during the five years we were in the college near our building and running together by us to pick the green/ripe mangoes as fast as possible defying inclement weather and rain etc. were simply irresistible. The list was endless. I was going to miss very much the competition among us regarding number of mangoes we could collect for our few girlfriends whom we wanted to impress! I

The sounds of the canyon are different now. Settlers have crowded in. Fences and longhorns dot the land as far as the eye can see. Nowadays, I wake to the rumble of engines, do chores to the whoop and holler of a hundred cowhands, and go to sleep to the blast of the train whistles. But some days when I ride north beyond the last stand of salt cedar, I can once again hear the faint chords of the old songs. I hear the clatter of clashing horns. I hear the bellowing of the bulls. I hear the muffled thud of hooves as they hurl up dust. And I live on the keen edge of hope that one day the strains of that sweet, wild music will echo far beyond these canyon walls.

that he was about to black out and he was glad: at that moment there was nothing he wanted more than oblivion. CHAPTER 36 Even though he was following the news closely on the radio, Dinu had trouble understanding exactly what was under way in northern Malaya. The bulletins mentioned a major engagement in the region of Jitra but the reports were inconclusive and confusing. In the meantime, there were other indications of the way the war was going, all of them ominous. One of these was an official newspaper announcement listing the closing of certain post offices in the north. Another was the increasing volume of southbound traffic: a stream of evacuees was pouring down the north–south highway in the direction of Singapore. One day, on a visit to Sungei Pattani, Dinu had a glimpse of this exodus. The evacuees seemed to consist mainly of the families of planters and mining engineers. Their cars and trucks were filled with household objects—furniture, trunks, suitcases. He came across a truck that was loaded with a refrigerator, a dog and an upright piano. He spoke to the man who was driving the truck: he was a Dutchman, the manager of a rubber plantation near Jitra. His family was sitting crowded in the truck’s cab: his wife, a newborn baby and two girls. The Dutchman said he’d managed to get out just ahead of the Japanese. His advice to Dinu was to leave as soon as possible—not to make the mistake of waiting until the last minute. That night, at Morningside, Dinu told Alison exactly what the Dutchman had said. They looked at each other in silence: they had been over the subject several times before. They knew they had very few choices. If they went by road, one of them would have to stay behind—the estate’s truck was in no shape to make the long journey to Singapore and the Daytona would not be able to carry more than two passengers over the

A grudge held from the last cycle may kill the promotion of an otherwise deserving person the next time around. Google’s engineering team solved these problems with promotion committees, which were assembled off-site for one day twice a year. They debated the promotions of other people’s direct reports, not their own, based on a packet of relatively objective information about each person’s accomplishments.

And yet in less than a year Arthur Rudolph, Georg Rickhey, Wernher von Braun, Major General Walter Dornberger, and other rocket engineers would secretly be heading to America to work. In the last days of World War II few would ever have believed such a thing.

Anyone who remembers licking stamps before the days of self-adhesives will appreciate Fibber’s description that the last batch he had “tasted like a rubber floor mat out of the engine room of a diesel-powered Scandinavian tuna boat.

Ron Gilbert, took inspiration from Sierra games like King’s Quest and Leisure Suit Larry but, more than just the game, what Maniac Mansion (and Ron) gave LucasArts was the underlying engine created for the game, SCUMM‡. This would form the backbone of future hits for the company such as Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, Maniac Mansion sequel Day of the Tentacle, two Indiana Jones games (one based on The Last Crusade, the other an original adventure called The Fate of Atlantis), Sam & Max Hit the Road and, most famously, The Secret of Monkey Island. Humour permeates all these games successfully in a way it rarely has before or since. Monkey Island’s ‘insult’ sword-fight is perhaps the best-known example, but there are many more. The jokes even operate between games;

I've found that all it usually takes to draw out an engineer is to ask a couple of technical questions and then remain calm while listening to the answers. Most people tend to take on a blank, frightened look as soon as they realize that a technical explanation is under way; if you can resist giving this reaction and simply listen, your engineer will open up and tell you everything you ever wanted to know.