Fair And Square Quotes

He spreads his fingers over my heart, like he’s holding it, like it belongs to him, the hard-fought-for territory he’s won fair and square.

Unhappiness. There are all kinds of unhappy people in the world. I suppose it would be no exaggeration to say that the world is composed entirely of unhappy people. But those people can fight their unhappiness with society fairly and squarly, and society for its part easily understands and sympathizes with such struggles. My unhappiness stemmed entirely from my own vices, and I had no way of fighting anybody.

What a rotten shilling punter!" said Bramble, tearing her bread to bits. "I can't believe he stole our things! Especially the watch! We stole that watch first, fair and square!

If "If freckles were lovely, and day was night, And measles were nice and a lie warn't a lie, Life would be delight,-- But things couldn't go right For in such a sad plight I wouldn't be I. If earth was heaven and now was hence, And past was present, and false was true, There might be some sense But I'd be in suspense For on such a pretense You wouldn't be you. If fear was plucky, and globes were square, And dirt was cleanly and tears were glee Things would seem fair,-- Yet they'd all despair, For if here was there We wouldn't be we.

I earned this, fair and square." We'll, maybe it hadn't been fair. And maybe it hadn't been precisely square. Still, she'd earned it legally. Legally and... rectangularly. That would have to do.

Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large unexpected cheque in the post, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafing along unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset, pausing to gaze in shop windows or at some church or lovely square or tranquil stretch of quayside, hesitating at street corners to decide whether that cheerful and homy restaurant you will remember fondly for years is likely to lie down this street or that one? I just love it. I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.

We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world - its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and not be afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.

It had all been a motherfucking nightmare and the solution was so simple, right there and under their noses. It had just been hidden: love. Fair and square. Just love.

And I won 'em back fair and square. So what are you going to do about it? Want to fight? Who wants the first bloody nose?

The road to the promised land runs past Sinai. The moral law may exist to be transcended: but there is no transcending it for those who have not first admitted its claims up on them, and then tried with all their strength to meet that claim, and fairly and squarely faced the fact of their failure.

These were times when all were judged squarely and fairly on their musical tastes, and a personal music collection read as private medical records.

It means that your birth, with all your particulars, is a wildly improbable event, and hence precious. You won the sweepstakes by being born at all. Think of all the wallflower sperm and egg cells. You made it, buddy. Whew! What a staggering wonder! What a thing to rejoice in! The lottery wasn't fixed! God didn't rig it! You won fair and square! What a miracle!

Let the watchwords of all our people be the old familiar watchwords of honesty, decency, fair-dealing, and commonsense."... "We must treat each man on his worth and merits as a man. We must see that each is given a square deal, because he is entitled to no more and should receive no less.""The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us.

Unhappiness. There are all kinds of unhappy people in the world. I suppose it would be no exaggeration to say that the world is composed entirely of unhappy people. But those people can fight their unhappiness with society fairly and squarly, and society for its part easily understands and sympathizes with such struggles.

Hobbits delighted in such things, if they were accurate; they liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions.

And when matins and the first mass was done, there was seen in the churchyard, against the high altar, a great stone four square, like unto a marble stone; and in midst thereof was like an anvil of steel a foot on high, and therein stuck a fair sword naked by the point, and letters there were written in gold about the sword that said thus:—Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is rightwise king born of all England.

For fairness and loyalty, however important to the head, were issues that could seldom be squared in the human heart, at the deepest depths of which lay the mystery of affection, of love, which you either felt or you didn't, pure as instinct, which seized you, not the other way around, making a mockery of words like "should" and "ought". The human heart, where compromise could not be struck, not ever. Where transgressions exacted a terrible price. Where tangled black limbs fell. Where the boom got lowered.

We are given a great power, we should capable enough to handle it and use it fair and square.

If Harry had been less noble, less fair-minded, Cedric would have lived. It is a very classic example of how noble intentions often lead to tragic results.” He straightened, squared off with the hunter. “I have no desire to be Harry Potter.

It is notorious that the news of the Emancipation Proclamation was kept from the people of Texas and not celebrated until 'Juneteenth'. There may be those in Texas now who believe they can insulate their state—a state that had its own courageous revolution—from the news of evolution and from the writing in 1786 of a Constitution that refuses to mention religion except when demarcating and limiting its role in the public square. But we promise them today that they will join their fore-runners in the flat-earth community, and in the mad clerical clique of those who believed that the sun revolved around the earth. Yes, they will be in schoolbooks—as a joke on the epic scale of William Jennings Bryan. We shall be fair, and take care to ensure that their tale is told.

To fight the good fight is one of the bravest and noblest of life's experiences. Not the bloodshed and the battle of man with man, but the grappling with mental and spiritual adversaries that determines the inner caliber of the contestant. It is the quality of the struggle put forth by a man that proclaims to the world what manner of man he is far more than may be by the termination of the battle. It matters not nearly so much to a man that he succeeds in winning some long-sought prize as it does that he has worked for it honestly and unfalteringly with all the force and energy there is in him. It is in the effort that the soul grows and asserts itself to the fullest extent of its possibilities, and he that has worked will, persevering in the face of all opposition and apparent failure, fairly and squarely endeavoring to perform his part to the utmost extent of his capabilities, may well look back upon his labor regardless of any seeming defeat in its result and say, "I have fought a good fight." As you throw the weight of your influence on the side of the good, the true and the beautiful, your life will achieve an endless splendor. It will continue in the lives of others, higher, finer, nobler than you can even contemplate.

The path is a ribbon of moonlight across a dusky sea. The wind sings a song that beckons us To that great and mighty tree. We are the Greenowls of Ambala, clad in raiments of moss, Sprigged with lichens and grasses Then gilded with silvery frost. Fair and square we play- for a sporting lot we are. We ride the boisterous Balefire gusts And we reach for every star.

Now she’s talking to her soul pieces.” Siret was back to being amused over my weird brain. “Can I keep her?” He turned pleading eyes on his brothers, only for Yael to spin in a flash and deliver a punch right into the centre of his chest. “If anyone is keeping her, it’s me,” he snapped. “I won her fair and square.” Oh for fuc—“Listen up, assholes. For the last time, I’m not a piece of furniture that you guys own, and can trade around when you feel like it—

When Jesus rose from the dead, He didn't cheat death; He beat it fair and square.

It’s all fair and square,” said Miss Hardcastle. “You can’t put a few hundred thousand imported workmen—

[They] liked to have booked filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions’.

Why do we need so many people on Earth? I ask you. What are they good for? They live out ludicrous lives of pointless desperation. Ninety-nine percent of the human population is so much wasted resources. Stubborn vermin, we humans are. Granted, in the past, the unwashed masses were necessary. We needed them to till our fields and fight our wars. We needed them to labor in our factories making consumer crap that we flipped back at them at a handsome profit. Alas, those days are gone. We live in a boutique economy now. Energy is abundant and cheap. Mentars and robotic labor make and manage everything. So who needs people? People are so much dead white. They eat up our profits. They produce nothing but pollution and social unrest. They drive us crazy with their pissing and moaning. I think we can all agree that Corporation Earth is in need of a serious downsizing. ... The boutique economy has no need of the masses, so let's get rid of them. But how, you ask? Not with wars, surely, or disease, famine, or mass murder. Despots have tried all these methods through the millennia, and they're never a permanent solution. No, all we need to do is buy up the ground from under their feet -- and evict them. We're buying up the planet, Bishop, fair and square. We're turning it into the most exclusive gated community in history. Now, the question is, in two hundred years, will you be a member of the landowners club, or will you be living in some tin can in outer space drinking recycled piss?

She wore her best dinner dress, made of silk dyed in a fashionable shade called bois de rose, a deep earthy pink that flattered her fair complexion. It was a severely simple style, with a low square-cut bodice and skirts pulled back tightly to reveal the shape of her waist and hips.

Heavenly weather really. If life was always like that. Cricket weather. Sit around under sunshades. Over after over. Out. They can't play it here. Duck for six wickets. Still Captain Culler broke a window in the Kildare street club with a slog to square leg. Donnybrook fair more in their line. And the skulls we were acracking when M'Carthy took the floor. Heatwave. Won't last. Always passing, the stream of life, which in the stream of life we trace is dearer than them all.

I started out to be honest, with everything on the square. But a man can't fool with the Golden Rule in a crowd that won't play fair. You don't go down with a hard, short fall, you just sort of shuffle along. And loosen your load of the moral code, 'till you can't tell right from wrong.

Q: Do you have any advice for upcoming writers who want to pen weird stories? A: READ, damn it. Fill your brain to the bursting point with the good stuff, starting with writers that you truly enjoy, and then work your way backward and outward, reading those writers who inspired the writers you love best. That was my path as far as Weird/Horror Fiction, starting with Lovecraft, and then working my way backward/outward on the Weird Fiction spiderweb. And don’t limit your reading. Read it all, especially non-fiction and various news outlets. You’d be surprised by how many of my story ideas were born while listening to NPR, perusing a blog, or paging through Vanity Fair. Once you have your fuel squared away, just write what you love, in whatever style and genre. You’ll never have fun being someone you’re not, so be yourself. When a singer opens their mouth, what comes out is what comes out. Also, don’t be afraid to fail, and don’t be afraid to walk away. Writing isn’t for everyone, and that’s totally fine. One doesn’t need to be a writer to enjoy being a reader and overall fan of genre or wider fiction.

... I regularly frequent St. George';s, Hanover Square, during the genteel marriage season; and though I have never seen the bridegroom's male friends give way to tears, or the beadles and officiating clergy in any way affected, yet it is not at all uncommon to see women who are not in the least concerned in the operations going on -- old ladies who are long past marrying, stout middle-aged females with plenty of sons and daughters, let alone pretty young creatures in pink bonnets, who are on their promotion, and may naturally taken an interest in the ceremony -- I say it is quite common to see the women present piping, sobbing, sniffling; hiding their little faces in their little useless pocket-handkerchiefs; and heaving, old and young, with emotion.

Truman, Acheson knew, was far more sentimental than generally known, or than he wished people to know, far more touched by gestures that to many might seem routine. On board his plane later in the year, bound again for Key West, he would write Acheson a brief longhand note marked and underscored “Personal.” It was good of you to see us off. You always do the right thing. I’m still a farm boy and when the Secretary of State of the greatest Republic comes to the airport to see me off on a vacation, I can’t help but swell up a little. “And then he was so fair,” Acheson would say. “He didn’t make different decisions with different people. He called everyone together. You were all heard and you all got the answer together. He was a square dealer all the way through.

Some modern theologians have, quite rightly, protested against an excessively moralistic interpretation of Christianity. The Holiness of God is something more and other than moral perfection: His claim upon us is something more and other than the claims of moral duty. I do not deny it: But this conception, like that of corporate guilt, is very easily used as an evasion of the real issue. God may be more than moral goodness: He is not less. The road to the promised land runs past Sinai. The moral law may exist to be transcended, but there is no transcending it for those who have not first admitted its claims upon them, and then tried with all their strength to meet that claim, and fairly and squarely face the fact of their failure.

In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori Baskets of olives and lemons, Cobbles spattered with wine And the wreckage of flowers. Vendors cover the trestles With rose-pink fish; Armfuls of dark grapes Heaped on peach-down. On this same square They burned Giordano Bruno. Henchmen kindled the pyre Close-pressed by the mob. Before the flames had died The taverns were full again, Baskets of olives and lemons Again on the vendors' shoulders. I thought of the Campo dei Fiori In Warsaw by the sky-carousel One clear spring evening To the strains of a carnival tune. The bright melody drowned The salvos from the ghetto wall, And couples were flying High in the cloudless sky. At times wind from the burning Would drift dark kites along And riders on the carousel Caught petals in midair. That same hot wind Blew open the skirts of the girls And the crowds were laughing On that beautiful Warsaw Sunday. Someone will read as moral That the people of Rome or Warsaw Haggle, laugh, make love As they pass by martyrs' pyres. Someone else will read Of the passing of things human, Of the oblivion Born before the flames have died. But that day I thought only Of the loneliness of the dying, Of how, when Giordano Climbed to his burning There were no words In any human tongue To be left for mankind, Mankind who live on. Already they were back at their wine Or peddled their white starfish, Baskets of olives and lemons They had shouldered to the fair, And he already distanced As if centuries had passed While they paused just a moment For his flying in the fire. Those dying here, the lonely Forgotten by the world, Our tongue becomes for them The language of an ancient planet. Until, when all is legend And many years have passed, On a great Campo dei Fiori Rage will kindle at a poet's word.

And in the shadow of the square below, a small movement betrayed the presence of a man. Waiting. Roger closed his eyes, cold rising from his bare feet up his body, seeing in his mind the sudden vision of a green-eyed woman, lazy in the arms of a fair-haired lover … and a look of surprise and then of horror on her face as the man vanished from her side. And an invisible blue glow rose in her womb. With his eyes tight shut, he put a hand on the icy windowpane, and said a prayer to be going on with.

In the West, there was an old debate as to whether mathematical reality was made by mathematicians or, existing independently, was merely discovered by them. Ramanujan was squarely in the latter camp; for him, numbers and their mathematical relationships fairly threw off clues to how the universe fit together. Each new theorem was one more piece of the Infinite unfathomed. So he wasn’t being silly, or sly, or cute when later he told a friend, “An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.

Rain, rain, go away, come back when I am marathoning anime.

Ian Taggart had his own baggage. “Li doesn’t have a partner. If you wanted to get paternity leave—god, I vomited a little—then you should have manned up and gotten your own girl. Adam won the battle fair and square. He gets to stay with the wife and rug rat.” “It wasn’t a fucking battle. It was rock, paper, scissors, damn it. I think Adam cheated.” Jacob Dean frowned

Aren’t you coming with us?” I feel his hand on my cheek. I know what this means and I slap his hand away. “You’re coming with us, Evan,” I say. “There’s something I have to do.” “That’s right.” My hand flails for his in the dark. I find it and pull hard. “You have to come with us.” “I’ll find you, Cassie. Don’t I always find you? I—” “Don’t, Evan. You don’t know you’ll be able to find me.” “Cassie.” I don’t like the way he says my name. His voice is too soft, too sad, too much like a good-bye voice. “I was wrong when I said I was both and neither. I can’t be; I know that now. I have to choose.” “Wait a minute,” Ben says. “Cassie, this guy is one of them?” “It’s complicated,” I answer. “We’ll go over it later.” I grab Evan’s hand in both of mine and press it against my chest. “Don’t leave me again.” “You left me, remember?” He spreads his fingers over my heart, like he’s holding it, like it belongs to him, the hard-fought-for territory he’s won fair and square. I give in. What am I going to do, put a gun to his head? He’s gotten this far, I tell myself. He’ll get the rest of the way. “What’s due north?” I ask, pushing against his fingers. “I don’t know. But it’s the shortest path to the farthest spot.” “The farthest spot from what?” “From here. Wait for the plane. When the plane takes off, run. Ben, do you think you can run?” “I think so.” “Run fast?” “Yes.” He doesn’t sound too confident about it, though. “Wait for the plane,” Evan whispers. “Don’t forget.” He kisses me hard on the mouth, and then the stairwell goes all Evanless.

Many peoples practiced agriculture, but they were never obsessed by the delusion that what they were doing was *right*, that everyone in the entire world had to practice agriculture, that every last square yard of the planet had to be devoted to it... If they got tired of being agriculturalists, if they found they didn't like where it was leading them in their particular adaptation, they were *able* to give it up. They didn't say to themselves, 'Well, we've got to keep going at this even if it kills us, because its the *right* way to live.' For example, there was once a people who constructed a vast network of irrigation canals in order to farm the deserts of what is now southeastern Arizona. They maintained these canals for three thousand years and built a fairly advanced civilization, but in the end they were free to say, 'This is a toilsome and unsatisfying way to live, so to hell with it.' They simply walked away from the whole thing and put it so totally out of mind that we don't even know what they called themselves. The only name we have for them is the one the Pima Indians gave them: Hohokam--those who vanished. But it's not going to be this easy for the Takers. It's going to be hard as hell for them to give it up, because what they're doing is *right*... Giving it up would mean that all along they'd been *wrong*. It would mean they'd *never* known how to rule the world. It would mean relinquishing their pretensions to godhood.... It would mean spitting out the fruit of that tree and giving the rule of the world back to the gods.

Submission or escape; to keep up the fair-and-square fight or compromise with lies; deception or placation; to be or not to be––which one is better? I don’t know. I don’t know, so it causes me suffering.

God, God is against thee, old man; forbear! 't is an ill voyage! ill begun, ill continued; let me square the yards, while we may, old man, and make a fair wind of it homewards, to go on a better voyage than this.

whale.The vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous din. For hours and hours from the almost stationary ship that hideous sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives.

All of a sudden, he said, ‘You know, there’s something to your game. Republicans are always calling for a return to normalcy, contentment, the status quo. And we’re always pushing forward with our square deals and new deals and fair Americas.

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

I stand for the square deal," Roosevelt said. "But when I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service. One word of warning, which, I think, is hardly necessary in Kansas. When I say I want a square deal for the poor man, I do not mean that I want a square deal for the man who remains poor because he has not got the energy to work for himself. If a man who has had a chance will not make good, then he has got to quit.

The idealized image of American citizenship pleased people like Roosevelt, but there was a negative side to the image of a pure American government of individualistic citizens. Those who seemed to support special interests were often purged from government, even if they had won elections fair and square. Their success in winning office simply proved to mainstream Americans that they were corrupting society and strengthened the resolve to get rid of them. In November 1898, for example, the “best citizens” of Wilmington, North Carolina, launched a race riot to purify the city government of the Populist/African American coalition that had won election in 1896.

Several Terminal Policy readers got together to tell Raker jokes: - Raker CAN piss into the wind. - Raker donates a lot of blood to the Red Cross -- just never his own. - Superman wears Raker pajamas. - When Raker jumps into the pool, he doesn't get wet -- the pool gets Raker. - Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Raker THREW her there!! - Raker's daughter lost her virginity ... he got it back. - Raker doesn't cheat death, he wins fair and square. - Raker turns on a light at night … not because he's afraid of the dark but because the dark is afraid of him. - When the boogy man goes to bed he checks under his bed for Raker. - Don’t tread on Raker’s cape!

I don’t want to fight you. But perhaps there’s another way I could win your favor.” The way he said it made her hearts pound and her body heat up. But even if her hormones were moved, her ambitions remained unswayed. “I’m only going to say this one time, so hear me well. If you want me, don’t let some bounty come between us,” she finally said. “I’m not playing games anymore. Either it’s real, or it’s nothing. I will not be seduced away from my own success.” She waited a long moment as he thought about it. “You win this one fair and square,” he finally said. “I suppose I wouldn’t want to try lying to the Grand Inquisitor, anyway. I can prove myself on my own.” A brief pause. “And we’ll see how you might be seduced.” The comlink went silent. As she and Sixty-Seven walked back to her ship, she watched Tualon’s ship take off from just a few klicks away and zip into the sky. Now, this was a version of Tualon she could respect. Honest with himself and others, ambitious and confident. She looked forward to seeing where the seduction might come in. For all that she’d been drawn to him since they were children, he’d always been neutral toward her, never felt that same tug. But now, freed from the rigidity of the Jedi ways, perhaps he was finally realizing how powerful a partner she might be. They would make a good team, but not if he thought he was in charge. No one could rule Iskat Akaris.

Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of miles without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 870,000 square miles of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.

Mmm, nice," he said close to her ear. She turned her head to look at him and their lips were almost touching. "What's nice?" she asked breathlessly. "You." He sat down and pulled her into his arms, brushing her lips lightly and then deepening the kiss. "Lord, I've been wanting to hold you all day," he whispered against her lips. She cupped his lean, square jaw in her hands. "Me,too. Please, can we go someplace to be alone?" "Darlin', God knows I crave that delectable little body of yours but we really shouldn't. It's not fair to you." Willow slid off his lap and knelt, shaking her finger at him. "Listen, Tumbleweed, I'll tell you what's not fair. It's that damn kiss-and-run routine! It ain't fair to get me so...so...horny!" Rider burst out laughing. God how he wished he could tell her how much he loved her. He settled for folding her in his arms and showing her instead. When they both came up for air, she smiled seductively and threaded her fingers through the dark hair exposed in the vee of his shirt. "Rider," she whispered seductively. "I love touching you." Rider was lost.

George meanwhile, with his hat on one side, his elbows squared, and his swaggering martial air, made for Bedford Row, and stalked into the attorney’s offices as if he was lord of every pale-faced clerk who was scribbling there. He ordered somebody to inform Mr. Higgs that Captain Osborne was waiting, in a fierce and patronizing way, as if the pekin of an attorney, who had thrice his brains, fifty times his money, and a thousand times his experience, was a wretched underling who should instantly leave all his business in life to attend on the Captain’s pleasure. He did not see the sneer of contempt which passed all round the room, from the first clerk to the articled gents, from the articled gents to the ragged writers and white-faced runners, in clothes too tight for them, as he sate there tapping his boot with his cane, and thinking what a parcel of miserable poor devils these were. The miserable poor devils knew all about his affairs. They talked about them over their pints of beer at their public-house clubs to other clerks of a night. Ye gods, what do not attorneys and attorneys’ clerks know in London! Nothing is hidden from their inquisition, and their families mutely rule our city.

Blifil was so desirous of the match that he intended to deceive Sophia, by pretending love to her; and to deceive her father and his own uncle, by pretending he was beloved by her. In doing this he availed himself of the piety of Thwackum, who held, that if the end proposed was religious (as surely matrimony is), it mattered not how wicked were the means. As to other occasions, he used to apply the philosophy of Square, which taught, that the end was immaterial, so that the means were fair and consistent with moral rectitude.

Throughout his political career, Roosevelt’s conception of leadership had been built upon a narrative of the embattled hero (armed with courage, spunk, honor, and truth) who sets out into the world to prove himself. It was a dragon-slaying notion of the hero-leader, and Roosevelt had the good fortune to strike the historical moment in which he could prove his mettle. Under the banner of “the Square Deal,” he would lead his country in a different kind of war, a progressive battle designed to restore fairness to America’s economic and social life.

Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large unexpected check in the mail, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafing along unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset, pausing to gaze in shop windows or at some church or lovely square or tranquil stretch of quayside, hesitating at street corners to decide whether that cheerful and homey restaurant you will remember fondly for years is likely to lie down this street or that one? I just love it. I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.

It’s a work kid, a fucking lie. Our business is built on bullshit, every square inch of it. Call it deception, call it untruth, call it what you will. It is what it is. A work a dirty downright stinking fucking work. And whether it’s the dumb marks who pay to see this shit, or the dumb fucks who lace up every night to do it, they're all fair game, each and every one of em; suckers born to be fleeced for all their worth Anyone who says otherwise is probably working you twice as hard as I am. But hey, you already knew that, didn’t you? Welcome to the beast, that is, pro wrestling kid. Harvey Wallbanger Wrestling Promoter Extraordinaire

Come to my house right now, and I’ll let you sneak up to my room. I’ll be a sitting duck for you if it means I can see you again.” “No.” “No?” “No, I don’t want to win like that. When I get your name, I want to have the satisfaction of knowing I beat you fair and square. My first ever Assassins win can’t be tainted.” I pause. “And besides, your house is a safe zone.” Peter lets out an aggravated sigh. “Are you at least coming to my lacrosse game on Friday?” His lacrosse game! That’s the perfect place to take him out. I try to keep my voice calm and even as I say, “I can’t come. My dad has a date, and he needs me to watch Kitty.” A lie, but Peter doesn’t know that. “Well, can’t you bring her? She’s been asking to go to one of my games.” I think fast. “No, because she has a piano lesson after school.” “Since when does Kitty play the piano?” “Recently, in fact. She heard from our neighbor that it helps with training puppies; it calms them down.” I bite my lip. Will he buy it? I hurry to add, “I promise I’ll be at the next game no matter what.” Peter groans, this time even louder. “You’re killing me, Covey.” Soon, my dear Peter. I will surprise him at the game; I’ll get all decked out in our school colors; I’ll even paint his jersey number on my face. He’ll be so happy to see me, he won’t suspect a thing!

Our political culture is now so debased that we regularly hear ‘do gooders’ getting the blame for things. Enviromentalists trying to stop a coal-burning power plant or a new runway that will (let’s just remember) DESTROY THE EARTH are branded as our enemies, these ‘do gooders’. Like doing good is a bad thing. You read all the time in the press that ‘do gooders’ are to blame—a sweepingly derogatory term. Or even worse, the ‘so-called do gooders’. I’ve never once read that the blame was being put fairly and squarely on ‘cunts’, and let’s face it ‘cunts’ must be behind fucking things up far more things than ‘do gooders’. If it’s not ‘cunts’ then I blame those ‘so-called cunts’.

I wasn't taught to hate white people. That dead body hanging from the platform broke the heart and wounded the spirit of every black man and woman who passed by. But I suspected that it also hurt right-thinking white people. Both parents had spoken well of fair-minded white people - my namesake, Jim O'Reilly, and Flake Cartledge - so I knew better than to blame a whole race for the rotten deeds of a few. When some blacks talked about whites as devils, I could see the source of their wrath. I could still see the dead man outside the courthouse on the square. But I couldn't turn the fury into hatred. Blind hatred, my mother had taught me, poisons the soul. I kept hearing her say, 'If you're kind to people, they'll be kind to you.

condemn. His analysis of equality as a moral principle, his “fairness objection,” does not get beyond the schoolyard taunt that such-and-such is “not fair.” Yet if charging tolls on congested highways is “unfair to commuters of modest means” (in Sandel’s repeated formulation of the first principle), what is to stop society from concluding that charging for bread and housing and clothing and cable TV and Fritos is “unfair”?7 Nothing. The society ends in full-blown statism, a modern leviathan. The unanalyzed dictum that it’s “unfair” that Carden does not have his own 5,000-square-foot supersuite at the Bellagio in Las Vegas (he really does find it troubling) would slip down to allocation by state direction by the Communist or Nazi Party for everything. Byelorussia.

For many people today, gardening is about lawns and almost nothing else. In the United States lawns cover more surface area—fifty thousand square miles—than any single farm crop. Grass on domestic lawns wants to do what wild grasses do in nature—namely, grow to a height of about two feet, flower, turn brown, and die. To keep it short and green and continuously growing means manipulating it fairly brutally and pouring a lot of stuff onto it. In the western United States about 60 percent of all the water that comes out of taps for all purposes is sprinkled on lawns. Worse still are the amounts of herbicides and pesticides—seventy million pounds of them a year—that are soaked into lawns. It is a deeply ironic fact that for most of us keeping a handsome lawn is about the least green thing we do.

On the phone a few nights later, Peter suddenly says, “You have me, don’t you?” “No!” I haven’t told him I took out John over the weekend. I don’t want him--or Genevieve, for that matter--to have any extra info. It’s down to the three of us now. “So you do have me!” He lets out a groan. “I don’t want to play this game anymore. It’s making me lonely and really…frustrated. I haven’t seen you outside of school for a week! When is this going to be over?” “Peter, I don’t have you. I have John.” I feel a little guilty for lying, but this is how winners play this game. You can’t second-guess yourself. There’s a silence on the other end. Then he says, “So are you going to drive over to his house to tag him out? He lives in the middle of nowhere. I could take you if you want.” “I haven’t figured out my game plan yet,” I say. “Who do you have?” I know it has to be me or Genevieve. He gets quiet. “I’m not saying.” “Well, have you told anyone else?” Like, say, Genevieve? “No.” Hmm. “Okay, well, I just told you, so you obviously owe me that same courtesy.” Peter bursts out, “I didn’t make you, you offered up that information yourself, and look, if it was a lie and you have me, please just freaking take me out already! I’m begging you. Come to my house right now, and I’ll let you sneak up to my room. I’ll be a sitting duck for you if it means I can see you again.” “No.” “No?” “No, I don’t want to win like that. When I get your name, I want to have the satisfaction of knowing I beat you fair and square. My first ever Assassins win can’t be tainted.” I pause. “And besides, your house is a safe zone.

Billy ran around with a rare old crew And he knew an Arsenal from Tottenham blue We'd be a darn sight better off if we knew Where Billy's bones are resting now Billy saw a copper and he hit him in the knee And he took him down from six to five foot three Then he hit him fair and square in the do-re-mi That copper won't be having any family Hey Billy son where are you now? Don't you know that we need you now? With a rat-tat-tat and the old kowtow Where are Billy's bones resting now? Billy went away with a peace-keeping force 'Cause he liked a bloody good fight, of course Went away in an old khaki van To the banks of the River Jordan Billy saw the Arabs and he had 'em on the run When he got 'em in the range of his sub-machine gun Then he had the Israelis in his sights, went a rat-tat-tat And they ran like shites Hey Billy son where are you now? Don't you know that we need you now? With a rat-tat-tat and the old kowtow Where are Billy's bones resting now? One night Billy had a rare old time, Laughing and singing on the Lebanon line Came back to camp not looking too pretty Never even got to see the holy city Now Billy's out there in the desert sun And his mother cries when the morning comes And there's mothers crying all over this world For their poor dead darling boys and girls Hey Billy son where are you now? Don't you know that we need you now? With a rat-tat-tat and the old kowtow Where are Billy's bones resting now? Have a Billy holiday… Born on a Monday Married on a Tuesday Drunk on a Wednesday Got plugged on a Thursday Sick on a Friday Died on a Saturday Buried on a Sunday. "Billy's Bones

It is often a puzzle for foreigners why the United States has such a dismal performance when it comes to murder, guns, and mental illness, all features of American life that, when compared to most of the other wealthy countries, are so awful they do not require further documentation. You might wonder how those bad results square with America’s relatively strong performances on most social capital indices, such as trust, cooperation, and charitable philanthropy; on philanthropy, we even rate as the global number one. The truth is that those positive and negative facets are two sides of the same coin: Cooperation is very often furthered by segregating those who do not fit in. That creates some superclusters of cooperation among the quality cooperators and a fair amount of chaos and dysfunctionality elsewhere.

Family is everything to him. When he was a young boy, he lost his mother and four sisters to scarlet fever, and was sent away to boarding school. He grew up very much alone. So he would do anything to protect or help the people he cares about." She hefted the album into Keir's lap, and watched as he began to leaf through it dutifully. Keir's gaze fell to a photograph of the Challons relaxing on the beach. There was Phoebe at a young age, sprawling in the lap of a slender, laughing mother with curly hair. Two blond boys sat beside her, holding small shovels with the ruins of a sandcastle between them. A grinning fair-haired toddler was sitting squarely on top of the sandcastle, having just squashed it. They'd all dressed up in matching bathing costumes, like a crew of little sailors. Coming to perch on the arm of the chair, Phoebe reached down to turn the pages and point out photographs of her siblings at various stages of their childhood. Gabriel, the responsible oldest son... followed by Raphael, carefree and rebellious... Seraphina, the sweet and imaginative younger sister... and the baby of the family, Ivo, a red-haired boy who'd come as a surprise after the duchess had assumed childbearing years were past her. Phoebe paused at a tintype likeness of the duke and duchess seated together. Below it, the words "Lord and Lady St. Vincent" had been written. "This was taken before my father inherited the dukedom," she said. Kingston- Lord St. Vincent back then- sat with an arm draped along the back of the sofa, his face turned toward his wife. She was a lovely woman, with an endearing spray of freckles across her face and a smile as vulnerable as the heartbeat in an exposed wrist.

The pre-Thatcher state had functioned on the understanding that there was such a thing as society. Governments on both sides of the Atlantic had tried to find a workable middle ground between the laissez-faire capitalism of the nineteenth century and the new state communism of Russia or China. They had had some success in this project, from President Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s to the establishment of the UK’s welfare state during Prime Minister Attlee’s postwar government. The results may not have been perfect, but they were better than the restricting homogeny of life in the communist East, or the poverty and inequality of Victorian Britain. They resulted in a stable society where democracy could flourish and the extremes of political totalitarianism were unable to gain a serious hold. What postwar youth culture was rebelling against may indeed have been dull, and boring, and square. It may well have been a terminal buzz kill. But politically and historically speaking, it really wasn’t the worst.

As holders of money, labourers are free to buy as they please, and they have to be treated as consumers with autonomous tastes and preferences. We should not make light of this (Grundrisse, p. 283). Situations frequently arise in which labourers can and do exercise choice, and the manner in which they do so has important implications. And even if, as is usually the case, they are locked into buying only those commodities capitalists are prepared to sell, at prices capitalists dictate, the illusion of freedom of choice in the market plays a very important ideological role. It provides fertile soil for theories of consumer sovereignty as well as for that particular interpretation of poverty that puts the blame fairly and squarely upon the victim for failure to budget for survival properly. There are, in addition, abundant opportunities here for various secondary forms of exploitation (landlords, retail merchants, savings institutions), which may again divert attention from what Marx considered to be the central form of exploitation in production.

Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment, and it was gone. Climbing to a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with wasted tears. Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away. Chapter 6 — Hundreds of People The quiet lodgings of Doctor Manette were in a quiet street-corner not far from Soho-square. On the afternoon of a certain fine Sunday when the waves of four months had roiled over the trial for treason, and carried

Dame Aline, somewhat younger than her husband, was a short, sturdily built woman with fair hair beneath a white lace coif, small square hands, a merry giggle. She had a mask of light freckles across her face that on feast days she hid beneath a powder of rice mixed with dried white rose-petal: a faint scent of rose hung about her even tonight, when she wore no powder. Her cheeks were full, making Hob think at first of a squirrel with acorns in its cheeks. He thought her plain, especially next to the ivory perfection of Lady Isabeau. As the evening wore on, though, she seemed more appealing to him, by reason of her blithe chatter, her delight in each jest, and above all the contrast she made with the dire ominous bulk of her husband. He sat beside her and cut her meat, as was polite: men cut for women, the younger for the elder, the lesser for the greater. When he had done, she placed her hand on his arm affectionately; she smiled in his face. Her rounded cheek, her easy laugh, lent her a childlike prettiness, and Hob wondered that she had no fear of the sinister castellan, who made even the tough-as-gristle sergeant Ranulf uneasy.

River was in his office, having spent the day staring at his screen, or else through the window, which had planted a square of sunlight onto the vacant desk he shared the room with. It had once been where Sid Baker sat, and that remained its chief significance even during JK Coe’s tenure, which hadn’t been fair on Coe, but Slough House wasn’t big on fairness. And now Sid was back. All this time, she’d been in the world, hidden away; partly erased but still breathing, waiting for the moment to appear to him, in his grandfather’s study. For months he’d been wondering what secrets might be preserved in that room, encrypted among a wealth of facts and fictions. Bringing them into the light would be a task for an archivist—a Molly Doran. He remembered sitting in the kitchen once, watching his grandmother prepare a Christmas goose: this had involved removing its organs, which Rose had set about with the same unhurried calm she had approached most things, explaining as she did so the word haruspicate. To divine the future from the entrails of birds or beasts. He’d planned the opposite: to unshelve those books, crack their spines, break their wings, and examine their innards for clues to the past. His grandfather’s past, he’d assumed. Instead, what he’d found in that room was something broken off from his own life. Now read on.

Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The

I’m not a coward.” He didn’t speak loud, but his voice carried. His father turned slowly to the challenging words. “I’m not a coward,” Wintrow repeated more slowly. “I’m not big. I don’t claim to be strong. But I’m neither a weakling nor a coward. I can accept pain. When it’s necessary.” A strange odd light had come into Kyle’s eyes. The beginnings of a smile hovered at the corners of his mouth. “You are a Haven,” he pointed out with a quiet pride. Wintrow met his gaze. There was neither defiance nor the will to injure but the words were clear. “I’m a Vestrit.” He looked down to the bloody handprint on Vivacia’s deck, to the severed forefinger that still rested there. “You’ve made me a Vestrit.” He smiled without joy or mirth. “What did my grandmother say to me? ‘Blood will tell.’ Yes.” He stooped to the deck and picked up his own severed finger. He considered it carefully for a moment, then held it out to his father. “This finger will never wear a priest’s signet,” he said. To some he might have sounded drunken, but to Vivacia his voice was broken with sorrow. “Will you take it, sir? As a token of your victory?” Captain Kyle’s fair face darkened with the blood of anger. Vivacia suspected he was close to hating his own flesh and blood at that moment. Wintrow stepped lightly toward him, a very strange light in his eyes. Vivacia tried to understand what was happening to the boy. Something was changing inside him, an uncoiling of strength was filling him. He met his father’s gaze squarely, yet his own voice was nothing of anger, nor even pain as he stepped forward boldly, to a place close enough to invite his father to strike him. Or embrace him. But Kyle Haven moved not at all. His stillness was a denial, of all the boy was, of all he did. Wintrow knew in that instant that he would never please his father, that his father had never even desired to be pleased by him. He had only wanted to master him. And now he would not.

At night in the tent, he leaves the flaps open, to feel the fire outside, to hear Anthony in the trailer, to see her better. She asks him to lie on his stomach, and he does, though he can't see her, while she runs her bare breasts over his disfigured back, her nipples hardening into his scars. You feel that? she whispers. Oh, he does. He still feels it. She kisses him from the top of his head downward, from his buzz-cut scalp, his shoulder blades, his wounds. Inch by inch she cries over him and kisses her own salt away, murmuring into him, why did you have to keep running? Look what they did to you. Why didn't you just stay put? Why couldn't you feel I was coming for you? You thought I was dead, he says. You thought I had been killed and pushed through the ice in Lake Ladoga. And what really happened was, I was a Soviet man left in a Soviet prison. Wasn't I dead? He is fairly certain he is alive now, and while Tatiana lies on top of his back and cries, he remembers being caught by the dogs a kilometer from Oranienburg and held in place by the Alsatians until Karolich arived, and being flogged in Sachsenhausen's main square and then chained and tattooed publicly with the 25-point star to remind him of his time for Stalin, and now she lies on his back, kissing the scars he received when he tried to escape to make his way back to her so she could kiss him. As he drives across Texas, Alexander remembers himself in Germany lying in the bloody straw after being beaten and dreaming of her kissing him, and these dreams morph with the memories of last night, and suddenly she is kissing not the scars but the raw oozing wounds, and he is in agony for she is crying and the brine of her tears is eating away the meat of his flesh, and he is begging her to stop because he can't take it anymore. Kiss something else, he pleads. Anything else. He's had enough of himself. He's sick of himself. She is tainted not just with the Gulag. She is tainted with his whole life. Does it hurt when I touch them? He has to lie. Every kiss she plants on his wounds stirs a sense memory of how he got them. He wanted her to touch him, and this is what he gets. But if he tells her the truth, she will stop. So he lied. No, he says.

In Memory of W. B. Yeats I He disappeared in the dead of winter: The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, And snow disfigured the public statues; The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day. Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems. But for him it was his last afternoon as himself, An afternoon of nurses and rumours; The provinces of his body revolted, The squares of his mind were empty, Silence invaded the suburbs, The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers. Now he is scattered among a hundred cities And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections, To find his happiness in another kind of wood And be punished under a foreign code of conscience. The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living. But in the importance and noise of to-morrow When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse, And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom A few thousand will think of this day As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day. II You were silly like us; your gift survived it all: The parish of rich women, physical decay, Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth. III Earth, receive an honoured guest: William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry. In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate; Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye. Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice; With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.

The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.2 Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa. Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin ‘domus’, which means ‘house’. Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens.

When Oliver called time a few moments later, she’d beaten them all. But she’d beaten Mr. Pinter by only one bird. “It appears, Lady Celia, that you’ve won a new rifle,” the duke said graciously. “No,” she answered. They all stared at her. “It doesn’t seem sporting to win a challenge only because one of my opponents had a faulty firearm. Which we provided to him, by the way.” “Don’t worry,” Mr. Pinter drawled. “I won’t hold the fault firearm against you and your brothers.” “That’s not the point. This should be fair, and it isn’t.” “Then we’ll move forward,” Oliver said, “and let the servants flush the grouse again. Pinter can take one more shot. That’s probably all that the misfire delayed him by. If he misses, then you’ve won squarely. If he hits his target then it’s a tie, and we’ll decide a tie breaker.” “That seems fair.” She glanced over at Mr. Pinter. “What do you say, sir?” “Whatever my lady wishes.” His eyes met hers in a heated glance. She had the unsettling feeling that he referred to more than just the shooting. “Well, then,” she said lightly. “Let’s get on with it.” The beaters headed forward to flush the grouse, but either because of where the grouse had last settled or because of the beaters’ position, the birds rose farther away than was practical. “Damn it all,” Gabe uttered. “He won’t make a shot from here.” “You can ignore this one, and we’ll have them flushed again,” Celia said. But Mr. Pinter raised his gun to follow their flight. With a flash and the repugnant smell of black powder igniting, the gun fired and white smoke filled the air. She saw a bird fall. No, not one bird. He’d hit two birds with an impossible shot. Her breath lodged in her throat. She’d hit two with one shot a few times, due to how they clustered and how well the birdshot scattered, but to do it at such a distance… She glanced at him, astonished. No one had ever beaten her-and certainly not with such an amazing shot. Mr. Pinter gazed at her steadily as he handed off the gun to a servant. “It appears that I’ve won, my lady.” Her mouth went dry. “It does indeed.” Gabe hooted pleased at having escaped buying her a rifle. The duke and the viscount scowled, while Devonmont just looked amused as usual. All of that fell away as Mr. Pinter’s gaze dropped to her mouth. “Well done, Pinter,” Oliver said, clapping him on the shoulder. “You obviously more than earned a kiss.” For a moment, raw hunger flickered in his eyes. Then it was as if a veil descended over his face, for his features turned blank. He walked up to her, bent his head… And kissed her on the forehead. Hot color flooded her cheeks. How dared he kiss her last night as if she were a woman, and then treat her like a child in front of her suitors! Or worse, a woman beneath his notice! “Thank heavens that’s done,” she said loftily, trying to retain some dignity. The men all laughed-except Mr. Pinter, who watched her with a shuttered expression. As the other gentleman crowded round to congratulate him on his fine shot, she plotted. She would make him answer for every remark, every embarrassment of this day, as soon as she had the chance to get him alone. Because no man made a fool of her and got away with it.

AN ARTIST’S DEATH SALLY COOK | 118 words For Bryant I’ve often thought of writing about you, And how your voice once filled the little square How there was very little I could do Except go to the funeral home, just where They’d patched your broken face and made it new, And covered breaks in bone to make you fair Again with makeup, mucilage, and glue. I watched a line of students snake through there— This narrow clef of unsung dirge wound through To see you still and silent, just to stare At what had once been you; follow the queue— Death had destroyed your voice. It was a mere Two days ago your notes had filled the air. Tear as it will at beauty, death can do Nothing to lay its guts and sinews bare— Still, you lay satin-boxed, beyond repair.

I beat you fair and square," Kurda said evenly. "There's no rule against faking injury. You shouldn't have leapt in for the kill like you did. If you hadn't been so eager to disgrace me, my trick wouldn't have worked." Arra glared at the soon-to-be Vampire Prince, then dropped her gaze and muttered, "There is truth in your words." Lifting her eyes, she stared directly at Kurda. "I apologize for insulting you, Kurda Smahlt. I spoke in anger. Will you forgive me?" "I will if you'll take my hand." Kurda smiled. Arra shook her head shortly. "I cannot," she said miserably. "You beat me cleanly, and it shames me to refuse your hand — but I cannot bring myself to take it." Kurda looked hurt, but forced a smile. "That's OK," he said. "I forgive you anyway." "Thank you," Arra said, then turned and ran from the Hall, her features contorted with the pain of overwhelming shame. Kurda was heavy-hearted when he sat down beside me. "I feel sorry for her," he sighed. "It must be cruel to be so set in one's ways. Her refusal to shake my hand will haunt her the rest of her life. In her eyes, and the eyes of those who think like her, she's committed an unpardonable act. It doesn't matter much to me whether she shakes my hand or not, but she'll feel she's disgraced herself.

Soon after their arrival the archers had killed the murderous Earl of Cornwall and William took his place by buying the earldom from the king; similarly, his priestly brother became the bishop of Cornwall’s two-priest diocese by buying it from the Pope.   Everything was all done fair and square according to the traditions of the time.

For those seeking an alternative to Jordan Peterson’s dark vision of the world, questionable approach to truth and knowledge, and retreat to religion, they will find the answer in Bertrand Russell, whose essays on religion seem to, at times, be speaking directly to Peterson himself. Here’s the final paragraph from Russell’s essay Why I Am Not a Christian: "WHAT WE MUST DO We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world—its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is, and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past, or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time towards a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create. Russell wishes to replace fear, religion, and dogma with free-thinking, intelligence, courage, knowledge, and kindness. To believe something because it is seen to be useful, rather than true, is intellectually dishonest to the highest degree. And, as Russell points out elsewhere, he can’t recall a single verse in the Bible that praises intelligence. Here’s Russell in another essay, titled Can Religion Cure Our Troubles: Mankind is in mortal peril, and fear now, as in the past, is inclining men to seek refuge in God. Throughout the West there is a very general revival of religion. Nazis and Communists dismissed Christianity and did things which we deplore. It is easy to conclude that the repudiation of Christianity by Hitler and the Soviet Government is at least in part the cause of our troubles and that if the world returned to Christianity, our international problems would be solved. I believe this to be a complete delusion born of terror. And I think it is a dangerous delusion because it misleads men whose thinking might otherwise be fruitful and thus stands in the way of a valid solution. The question involved is not concerned only with the present state of the world. It is a much more general question, and one which has been debated for many centuries. It is the question whether societies can practise a sufficient modicum of morality if they are not helped by dogmatic religion. I do not myself think that the dependence of morals upon religion is nearly as close as religious people believe it to be. I even think that some very important virtues are more likely to be found among those who reject religious dogmas than among those who accept them. I think this applies especially to the virtue of truthfulness or intellectual integrity. I mean by intellectual integrity the habit of deciding vexed questions in accordance with the evidence, or of leaving them undecided where the evidence is inconclusive. This virtue, though it is underestimated by almost all adherents of any system of dogma, is to my mind of the very greatest social importance and far more likely to benefit the world than Christianity or any other system of organised beliefs.

Cassie got in her truck.She didnt own much , but it was all there with her.A vintage Balabushka pool cue won fair & square; a backpackfrom a Boy Scout packed with Laura,s letters.a phone number in Biloxi.Her tools ,her boots ,her clothes,some books;she had a .22 pistol ,a Ruger Single-Six,strapped to her ankle.She had three hundred thousand in cash in a metal box behind her seat . She drove away .

He thumbed through the drab pages, stopping now and again to linger over some scene of a deserted melancholy street, or a little grey lane hemmed in by sad plaster walls, and a feeling of almost intolerable loneliness came over him. Even the village squares or the open places in front of churches had this loneliness, this desertion, as if everyone had gone off for the day to attend some brilliant fair, leaving the town desolate and empty behind. In imagination, in memory, he stood in just such a little street now, as he had when he was a child—at sundown, after supper, on a summer evening, standing alone in the quiet street and listening to a steam calliope playing far away on the edge of the town, at the fairgrounds, before the evening performance of the circus. He closed the book and put it back on the shelf, remembering that moment so clearly and well that tears of pity came to his eyes—for the child, for himself, for the painter, he did not know whom.

When you cheat at poker, life, or taxes, you’ve taken the honor and fun out of winning, and ultimately you’ve cheated yourself out of the finest pleasure in life: beating the other guy fair and square. That’s what I was taught in school.

There was every type of the genus sporting man; stout, square farmers, with honest bull-dog physique, characteristic of John Bull plebeian; wild young Cantabs, mounted showily from livery-stables, with the fair, fearless, delicate features characteristic of John Bull patrician; steady old whippers-in, very suspicious of brandy; wrinkled feeders, with stentorian voices that the wildest puppy had learned to know and dread; the courteous, cordial aristocratic M.F.H., with the men of his class, the county gentry; rough, ill-looking cads, awkward at all things save crossing country; no end of pedestrians, nearly run over themselves, and falling into everybody’s way; and last, but in our eyes not least, the ladies who had come to see the hounds throw off.

Here in Alpha City, we have a common saying: “What we call ‘sky’ is merely a figment of our narrative.” The most dreamy-eyed among us seem to adorn themselves and their aspirations in that proverb and you’ll see it everywhere: in advertisements on the sides of streetcars and auto-rickshaws, spelled out in studs and rhinestones on designer jackets, emblazoned in the intricate designs of facial tattoos—even painted on city walls by putrid vandals and inspiring street artists. There is something glorious about kneading out into the doughy firmament the depth and breadth of one’s own universe, in rendering the contours of a sky whose limits are predicated only upon the bounds of one’s own imagination. The fact of the matter is that we cannot see the natural sky at all here. It is something like a theoretical mathematical expression: like the square-root of ‘negative one’—certainly it could be said to have a purpose for existing, but to cast eyes upon it, in its natural quantity, would be something akin to casting one’s eyes upon the raw elements comprising our everyday sustenance. How many of us have even borne close witness to the minute chemical compounds that react to lend battery power to our portable electronics? The sky is indeed such a concealed fixture now. It is fair to say that we have purged our memories of its true face and so we can only approximate a canvas and project our desires upon it to our heart’s dearest fancy. The most cynical among us would ostensibly declare it an unavoidable tragedy, but perhaps even these hardened individuals could not remember the naked sky well enough to know if what they were missing was something worthwhile. Perhaps, it’s cynical of me to say so! In any case, we have our searchlights pointed upwards and crisscrossing that expanse of heavens as though to make some sensational and profane joke of ourselves to the surrounding universe. We beam already video images of beauty pageants and dancing contests with smiling mannequins who look like buffoons. And so, the face of space cloaks itself behind our light pollution—in this respect, our mirrored sidewalks and lustrous streets do little to help our cause—and that face remains hidden from us in its jeering ridicule, its mocking laughter at this inexorable farce of human existence.

Translation,” I said. “We got around her fair and square. She won’t like it, but she’ll accept it.” “Oh yeah,” Thomas muttered under his breath. “This isn’t coming back to bite anyone in the ass later.

The genealogical trees at the end of the Red Book of Westmarch are a small book in themselves, and all but Hobbits would find them exceedingly dull. Hobbits delighted in such things, if they were accurate: they liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions.

The history of the land is a history of blood. In this history, someone wins and someone loses. There are patriots and enemies. Folk heroes who save the day. Vanquished foes who had it coming. It’s all in the telling. The conquered have no voice. Ask the thirty-eight Santee Sioux singing the death song with the nooses around their necks, the treaty signed fair and square, then nullified with a snap of the rope. Ask the slave women forced to bear their masters’ children, to raise and love them and see them sold. Ask the miners slaughtered by the militia in Ludlow. Names are erased. The conqueror tells the story. The colonizer writes the history, winning twice: A theft of land. A theft of witness. Oh, but let’s not speak of such things! Look: Here is an eagle whipping above the vast grasslands where the buffalo once thundered bold as gods. (The buffalo are here among the dead. So many buffalo.) There is the Declaration in sepia. (Signed by slave owners. Shhh, hush up about that, now!) See how the sun shines down upon the homesteaders’ wagons racing toward a precious claim in the nation’s future, the pursuit of happiness pursued without rest, destiny made manifest? (Never mind about those same homesteaders eating the flesh of neighbors. Winters are harsh in this country. Pack a snack.) The history is a hungry history. Its mouth opens wide to consume. It must be fed. Bring me what you would forget, it cries, and I will swallow it whole and pull out the bones bleached of truth upon which you will hang the myths of yourselves. Feed me your pain and I will give you dreams and denial, a balm in Gilead. The land remembers everything, though. It knows the steps of this nation’s ballet of violence and forgetting. The land receives our dead, and the dead sing softly the song of us: blood. Blood on the plains. In the rivers. On the trees where the ropes swing. Blood on the leaves. Blood under the flowers of Gettysburg, of Antioch. Blood on the auction blocks. Blood of the Lenape, the Cherokee, the Cheyenne. Blood of the Alamo. Blood of the Chinese railroad workers. Blood of the midwives hung for witchcraft, for the crime of being women who bleed. Blood of the immigrants fleeing the hopeless, running toward the open arms of the nation’s seductive hope, its greatest export. Blood of the first removed to make way for the cities, the factories, the people and their unbridled dreams: The chugging of the railways. The tapping of the telegram. The humming of industry. Sound burbling along telephone wires. Printing presses whirring with the day’s news. And the next day’s. And the day after that’s. Endless cycles of information. Cities brimming with ambitions used and discarded. The dead hold what the people throw away. The stories sink the tendrils of their hope and sorrow down into the graves and coil around the dead buried there, deep in its womb. All passes away, the dead whisper. Except for us. We, the eternal. Always here. Always listening. Always seeing. One nation, under the earth. E Pluribus unum mortuis. Oh, how we wish we could reach you! You dreamers and schemers! Oh, you children of optimism! You pioneers! You stars and stripes, forever! Sometimes, the dreamers wake as if they have heard. They take to the streets. They pick up the plow, the pen, the banner, the promise. They reach out to neighbors. They reach out to strangers. Backs stooped from a hard day’s labor, two men, one black, one white, share water from a well. They are thirsty and, in this one moment, thirst and work make them brothers. They drink of shared trust, that all men are created equal. They wipe their brows and smile up at a faithful sun.

HT-1 This point is difficult to access, as it is well protected by the structure of the human body. HT-1is a bilateral Vital Point that is located in the armpit at the junction of the inner arm with the torso. It is associated with the Heart Meridian and is the point that the internal aspects of that meridian leaves the inner torso and emerges close to the surface of the skin. It does not have a direct connection to any Extraordinary Vessels, but is highly sensitive to attack. Traditional Chinese Medicine state that this is a no-needle point in many related textbooks. On the surface, this point would appear to be a difficult one to access during an altercation, but it is accessible. HT-1 becomes easily accessible if the opponent’s arm is raised, which occurs in the short instances that they are throwing a punch. A quick finger thrust or one-knuckle fist strike can easily activate it, but it requires a fair amount of precision to land. Combat science teaches us that precision generally diminishes during an altercation, but I add the above variant for those that would be willing to put in the training time for achieve such a strike. Just remember that the likelihood of landing such a technique during an actual altercation is remote, even with copious amounts of practice. A more realistic attack to HT-1 is when you have used your opponent’s arm to take them to the ground. Once established, as a generally rule of thumb, it is advised that if you have established control over an opponent’s arm that you should maintain that control until you deliver a blow that ends the fight. So, with that in mind, one of my favorite attacks to HT-1 after driving an opponent to ground while having established and maintained arm control, that you jerk the arm towards yourself as you throw a kick into this Vital Point. The type of kick will be dependent on the positioning of your opponent. If he is bladed on the ground (laying on one side with the arm you control in the air) a hard side kick or stomp works well. If the opponent starts turning, or squaring his shoulders towards you as he hits the ground in an attempt to regain his feet, then a forceful forward, or straight kick, can work. I would suggest working with a training partner to determine the various configurations that a downed opponent would react when you maintain control of one of their arms. Notice that I did not advise that you kick your training partner in HT-1, which is ill advised since it theoretically can cause disruptions to the heart and according to Traditional Chinese Medicine theory even death. Again, this technique is not for demonstration or sport-oriented martial arts, but mature and thoughtful training practice can provide a wealth of knowledge on how best to attack a Vital Point, even if it is not actually struck.

étendre /etɑ̃dʀ/ I. vtr 1. (allonger) to stretch [bras, jambe] • il a étendu les bras/jambes | he stretched his arms/legs 2. (déployer) to spread (out) [bâche, nappe] • ~ du linge (dehors) to hang out washing; (dedans) to hang up washing 3. (coucher) to lay [sb] down [malade, blessé] • ~ qn (sur le carreau) (informal) (blesser) to lay sb out cold (familier), to floor GB sb; (tuer) to kill sb • ~ qn d'un coup de poing (informal) | to knock sb out • se faire ~ à un examen (informal) | to flunk (familier) an exam • ils se sont fait ~ par l'équipe adverse (informal) | they got thrashed (familier) by the opposing team 4. (diluer) to dilute, to water down [vin, solution] 5. (étaler) to spread [enduit, peinture, beurre]; (Culin) to roll out [pâte] 6. (accroître) to extend [emprise, pouvoir] (sur "over"); to extend [mesure, allocation, aide, embargo] (à "to") • il faut ~ le champ de nos connaissances | we must extend our range of knowledge • la société a étendu ses activités à de nouveaux secteurs | the company branched out into new fields II. vpr 1. (occuper un espace) to stretch (sur "over") • s'~ à perte de vue | to extend ou stretch as far as the eye can see • la forêt s'étend sur 10 000 km2 | the forest stretches over 10,000 square kilometres GB 2. (augmenter) [grève, épidémie, sécheresse, récession] to spread (à "to"); [ville] to expand, to grow 3. (s'appliquer) s'étendre à • [loi, mesure] to apply to 4. (durer) to stretch (sur "over"), last • la Renaissance s'étend de la fin du XVe siècle au milieu du XVIe siècle | the Renaissance stretched from the end of the 15th century to the middle of the 16th century • les travaux s'étendront sur trois ans | the work will last three years 5. (s'allonger) to lie down 6. (s'appesantir) s'étendre sur • to dwell on [sujet, point]

The antislavery Vermont Republican Charles Rich delivered a full refutation of the slaveholders, and with it a summation of an emerging antislavery constitutionalism.104 Although it pained him to oppose his longtime southern Republican allies, Rich said, he found it impossible to square the first principles of either the Declaration of Independence or the preamble of the Constitution with slavery. Although slavery existed at the nation’s founding, this misfortune hardly necessitated slavery’s continued existence. “By what charter of a national character,” he asked, “[has] a right to hold a human being in slavery … ever been recognised?” The absence of the word “slavery” in the Constitution signaled that, although “for obvious reasons, [the framers] were obliged indirectly to admit the fact of its existence, they purposely, and very carefully, avoided the use of any expressions from which, by fair construction, even an argument could be derived in favor of its legitimacy.” Any justification for slavery would have to be derived “by a reference to the laws of nature and natural rights, and not to the Constitution.” As slavery was strictly an unfortunate local institution, Rich asserted, Americans had an obligation, in accord with the laws of nature and natural rights, to prevent its extension, The Missouri question presented to the nation an irrevocable choice: Hitherto, slavery has not been so recognized by the General Government, as to cause our national character to be materially affected by it; for, although there are States in the Union which, from the necessity of the case, may be termed slave-holding States, it cannot, with truth, be alleged that, as a nation, we have permitted slavery. But if, under present circumstances, Congress shall solemnly decide that it cannot restrain the unlimited extension of it, and that a want of power to do so results from an unqualified recognition of it by the Constitution, our national character will become identified with it; and instead of its being, as heretofore, a local malady, and susceptible of cure, it must henceforth be regarded as affecting the whole system, and past the hope or possibility of a remedy. Rich bade his colleagues and countrymen to join in limiting “an evil which cannot at present be removed” or “diminished by dispersion”—hemming it in and keeping it a local institution “till removed, and our national character thereby preserved.”105

The best thing to do," said one of the malingerers, "is to sham madness. In the next room there are two other men from the school where I teach and one of them keeps shouting day and night : 'Giordano Bruno's stake is still smoldering ; renew Galileo's trial !'” “I meant at first to act the fool too and be a religious maniac and preach about the infallibility of the Pope, but finally I managed to get some cancer of the stomach for fifteen crowns from a barber down the road." "That's nothing," said another man. "Down our way there's a midwife who for twenty crowns can dislocate your foot so nicely that you're crippled for the rest of your life.” “My illness has run me into more than two hundred crowns already," announced his neighbor, a man as thin as a rake. "I bet there's no poison you can mention that I haven't taken. I'm simply bung full of poisons. I've chewed arsenic, I've smoked opium, I've swallowed strychnine, I've drunk vitriol mixed with phosphorus. I've ruined my liver, my lungs, my kidneys, my heart—in fact, all my insides. Nobody knows what disease it is I've got." "The best thing to do," explained someone near the door, "is to squirt paraffin oil under the skin on your arms. My cousin had a slice of good luck that way. They cut off his arm below the elbow and now the army'll never worry him any more.” “Well," said Schweik, "When I was in the army years ago, it used to be much worse. If a man went sick, they just trussed him up, shoved him into a cell to make him get fitter. There wasn't any beds and mattresses and spittoons like what there is here. Just a bare bench for them to lie on. Once there was a chap who had typhus, fair and square, and the one next to him had smallpox. Well, they trussed them both up and the M. O. kicked them in the ribs and said they were shamming. When the pair of them kicked the bucket, there was a dust-up in Parliament and it got into the papers. Like a shot they stopped us from reading the papers and all our boxes was inspected to see if we'd got any hidden there. And it was just my luck that in the whole blessed regiment there was nobody but me whose newspaper was spotted. So our colonel starts yelling at me to stand to attention and tell him who'd written that stuff to the paper or he'd smash my jaw from ear to ear and keep me in clink till all was blue. Then the M.O. comes up and he shakes his fist right under my nose and shouts: 'You misbegotten whelp ; you scabby ape ; you wretched blob of scum ; you skunk of a Socialist, you !' Well, I stood keeping my mouth shut and with one hand at the salute and the other along the seam of my trousers. There they was, running round and yelping at me. “We'll knock the newspaper nonsense out of your head, you ruffian,' says the colonel, and gives me 21 days solitary confinement. Well, while I was serving my time, there was some rum goings-on in the barracks. Our colonel stopped the troops from reading at all, and in the canteen they wasn't allowed even to wrap up sausages or cheese in newspapers. That made the soldiers start reading and our regiment had all the rest beat when it came to showing how much they'd learned.

LITTLE LOST PUP He was lost! — Not a shade of doubt of that; For he never barked at a slinking cat. But stood in the square where the wind blew raw, With a drooping ear, and a trembling paw, And a mournful look in his pleading eye. And a plaintive sniff at the passer-by That begged as plain as a tongue could sue, " Oh, Mister, please may I follow you?" A lorn, wee waif of a tawny brown Adrift in the roar of a heedless town. Oh, the saddest of sights in a world of sin Is a little lost pup with his tail tucked inl Well, he won my heart (for I set great store On my own red Bute, who is here no more) So I whistled clear, and he trotted up. And who so glad as that small lost pup? Now he shares my board, and he owns my bed, And he fairly shouts when he hears my tread. Then if things go wrong, as they sometimes do. And the world is cold, and I'm feeling blue. He asserts his right to assuage my woes With a warm, red tongue and a nice, cold nose, And a silky head on my arm or knee, And a paw as soft as a paw can be. When we rove the woods for a league about He's as full of pranks as a school let out; For he romps and frisks like a three-months colt. And he runs me down like a thunder-bolt. Oh, the blithest of sights in the world so fair Is a gay little pup with his tail in air! - Anonymous

After staying a fair while in Bodhgaya, we returned to Calcutta for a short stay at the Nalanda Square Buddhist Temple. I then took my leave of all my good friends there and got on the boat at the Calcutta docks. This was March, 1940. The fumes of the coming World War were growing thick and nearing the combustion point in Germany. I saw a lot of battleships in the Indian Ocean as our boat passed by.

I fitted my front so close to her back that we became one thing, like a man and wife should be. I set my warm palm on her shoulder (before it could turn cold on me). I drew her curtain of hair away to reveal the pink shell of her ear. Her boots put my mouth within easy whispering range, and I took full advantage. “I will always be fair with you. I will always be square with you . . . I will always take care of you.” I punctuated with a moist kiss to the sensitive spot behind her ear and felt her melt a little.

Like he can’t wait to eat me, fuck me, have me. Instead of forcing me like they could have, he won fair and square. Won me. And my body. But… can I pay up?

If one called this entire zone Arab-Judeo land, and then split it fairly between its residents—289 million Arabs, and 5.4 million Jews—the Jews would be entitled to a state that is at least 10 times the current size of Israel and the territories. To arrive at this figure one must simply divide the number Jews in Arab-Judeo land by the number of Arabs and Jews combined living in Arab-Judeo (5,400,000 Jews divided by 294,400,000). The result is that Jews total only 1.834% of the people of Arab-Judeo land. But 1.834% x 6,155,939 square miles yields nearly 113,000 square miles, a landmass nearly 14 times the size of pre-1967 Israel, and over 10 times the size of Israel and the territories taken together. Apportioning the land evenly on a per person basis is fair and moral in light of the fact that until the de facto expulsion of Jews in the middle of the last century, there were Jews all over Arab-Judeo land.

Hobbits delighted in such things, if they were accurate: they liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions.

If she had ever once in her life given the realities of life in seventeenth-century Bohemia a fleeting thought—and she most certainly had not—she would have pictured a world of superstition and suffering where obscenely rich and powerful aristocrats oppressed the miserable mass of grimy peasants whose lives were nasty, brutish, and short. Yet the folk she observed bustling around her, while admittedly grimy and short, seemed a fairly happy lot—judging solely from the air of amiable bonhomie permeating the Old Town square. Everywhere she looked, people were smiling, laughing, greeting one another with formal handshakes and kisses.