Founding Anniversary Quotes

You should date a girl who reads. Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve. Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn. She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book. Buy her another cup of coffee. Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice. It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does. She has to give it a shot somehow. Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world. Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two. Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series. If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are. You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype. You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots. Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads. Or better yet, date a girl who writes.

A year or two after emigrating, she happened to be in Paris on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of her country. A protest march had been scheduled, and she felt driven to take part. Fists raised high, the young Frenchmen shouted out slogans condemning Soviet imperialism. She liked the slogans, but to her surprise she found herself unable to shout along with them. She lasted only a few minutes in the parade. When she told her French friends about it, they were amazed. “You mean you don't want to fight the occupation of your country?” She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand. Embarrassed, she changed the subject.

And like the old men who sat around the piazzetta facing the Piave memorial, we’ll speak about two young men who found much happiness for a few weeks and lived the remainder of their lives dipping cotton swabs into that bowl of happiness, fearing they’d use it up, without daring to drink more than a thimbleful on ritual anniversaries.

My New Year's Eve is always 2 July, the night before my birthday. That's the night I make my resolutions. And this year scares the life out of me, because no matter how successful, how good things appear, there is always a deep core of failure within me, although I am trying to deal with it. My biggest fear, this coming year, is that I will be waking up alone. It makes me wonder how many bodies will be fished out of the Thames, how many decaying corpses will be found in one-room flats. I'm just being realistic.

If her back had ever hurt like this when she was twenty she would have been hysterical, demanding painkillers and cups of tea in bed, but she has found that nobody is especially surprised to hear you’re in pain when you’re in your eighties. You might find it astonishing, but nobody else does.

Time is so subjective, its measure totally dependent upon the means by which we mark its passage. When we follow the conventional milestones, meting out our lives with birthdays and graduations and anniversaries and funerals, we are left with voids along the way-vast stretches of empty space lost forever, never to be filled. As time grows short, the significance of each moment increases, until finally every heartbeat is of monumental importance. Or so it seems at first. I have discovered, almost too late, that time is not just arbitrary, but of no great consequence after all. She has taught me that a touch is a lifetime, a kiss forever, and that passion will transcend the limitations of fragile existence to span eternity. I no longer worry about the beat of my heart-I need only the memory of her to live on. My soul, my very being, pulses with wonder at the places within me that she has filled, with gratitude for the wounds she has healed, and with everlasting devotion for the love she has given. In her arms, I found passion and peace and a place to rest. No matter where I travel or what road I take to reach my detestation, I will always have the comfort of her hand in my and the soft whisper of her voice reminding me that I do not need to be afraid. This, this has always been my secret desire, and now I need search no further. I am Loved, and I am content,

Marlena's body was found on November 19, and so I consider that the anniversary of her death, though she almost certainly died on the eighteenth. Because for me, that day, she was still fully, hugely, annoyingly alive--deliberately ignoring my phone calls, up to something she'd no doubt tell me all about soon. Twelve days after November 19, I turned sixteen. Every year, it happens the same way: Marlena dies, I get older.

we’ll speak about two young men who found much happiness for a few weeks and lived the remainder of their lives dipping cotton swabs into that bowl of happiness, fearing they’d use it up, without daring to drink more than a thimbleful on ritual anniversaries.” But this thing that almost never was still beckons, I wanted to tell him. They can never undo it, never unwrite it, never unlive it, or relive it—it’s just stuck there like a vision of fireflies on a summer field toward evening that keeps saying, You could have had this instead. But going back is false. Moving ahead is false. Looking the other way is false. Trying to redress all that is false turns out to be just as false.

Increasingly today, archaeologists are circumventing this problem by a new technique termed accelerator mass spectrometry, which permits radiocarbon dating of tiny samples and thus lets one directly date a single small seed, small bone, or other food residue. In some cases big differences have been found between recent radiocarbon dates based on the direct new methods (which have their own problems) and those based on the indirect older ones.

I’m not sorry I kissed you,” he clarified, and my eyes found his then. “But I’m sorry I did it when you weren’t mine to kiss.

she had never trusted anyone the way she trusted him, and therefore found herself more open to experimentation than at any time in the past.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them. Robert Oppenheimer It

This isn't to deny that there were fierce arguments, at the time and ever since, about the causes and goals of both the Civil War and the Second World War. But 1861 and 1941 each created a common national narrative (which happened to be the victors' narrative): both wars were about the country's survival and the expansion of the freedoms on which it was founded. Nothing like this consensus has formed around September 11th.... Indeed, the decade since the attacks has destroyed the very possibility of a common national narrative in this country.

My parents died years ago. I was very close to them. I still miss them terribly. I know I always will. I long to believe that their essence, their personalities, what I loved so much about them, are - really and truly - still in existence somewhere. I wouldn't ask very much, just five or ten minutes a year, say, to tell them about their grandchildren, to catch them up on the latest news, to remind them that I love them. There's a part of me - no matter how childish it sounds - that wonders how they are. "Is everything all right?" I want to ask. The last words I found myself saying to my father, at the moment of his death, were "Take care." Sometimes I dream that I'm talking to my parents, and suddenly - still immersed in the dreamwork - I'm seized by the overpowering realization that they didn't really die, that it's all been some kind of horrible mistake. Why, here they are, alive and well, my father making wry jokes, my mother earnestly advising me to wear a muffler because the weather is chilly. When I wake up I go through an abbreviated process of mourning all over again. Plainly, there's something within me that's ready to believe in life after death. And it's not the least bit interested in whether there's any sober evidence for it. So I don't guffaw at the woman who visits her husband's grave and chats him up every now and then, maybe on the anniversary of his death. It's not hard to understand. And if I have difficulties with the ontological status of who she's talking to, that's all right. That's not what this is about. This is about humans being human.

New Rule: Stop pretending your drugs are morally superior to my drugs because you get yours at a store. This week, they released the autopsy report on Anna Nicole Smith, and the cause of death was what I always thought it was: mad cow. No, it turns out she had nine different prescription drugs in her—which, in the medical field, is known as the “full Limbaugh.” They opened her up, and a Walgreens jumped out. Antidepressants, anti-anxiety pills, sleeping pills, sedatives, Valium, methadone—this woman was killed by her doctor, who is a glorified bartender. I’m not going to say his name, but only because (a) I don’t want to get sued, and (b) my back is killing me. This month marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of a famous government report. I was sixteen in 1972, and I remember how excited we were when Nixon’s much ballyhooed National Commission on Drug Abuse came out and said pot should be legalized. It was a moment of great hope for common sense—and then, just like Bush did with the Iraq Study Group, Nixon took the report and threw it in the garbage, and from there the ’70s went right into disco and colored underpants. This week in American Scientist, a magazine George Bush wouldn’t read if he got food poisoning in Mexico and it was the only thing he could reach from the toilet, described a study done in England that measured the lethality of various drugs, and found tobacco and alcohol far worse than pot, LSD, or Ecstasy—which pretty much mirrors my own experiments in this same area. The Beatles took LSD and wrote Sgt. Pepper—Anna Nicole Smith took legal drugs and couldn’t remember the number for nine-one-one. I wish I had more time to go into the fact that the drug war has always been about keeping black men from voting by finding out what they’re addicted to and making it illegal—it’s a miracle our government hasn’t outlawed fat white women yet—but I leave with one request: Would someone please just make a bumper sticker that says, “I’m a stoner, and I vote.

Give a little party,” she insisted. “Just a small affair. Nobody will dress. It’s the anniversary of the founding of the Bloomer League—you didn’t even remember that.” “It’s no use,” said Tom.

found that scientists think about problems in much the same way artists do. Scientists and artists proved less similar in personality than in cognition, but both groups were similarly different from businessmen.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on.

On the tenth anniversary of her founding of the Betty Ford Center, President Ford said, “When the final tally is taken, her contributions to our country will be bigger than mine.” And that was just fine with him.

News of the disaster at Little Bighorn reached the Eastern Seaboard shortly after July 4, and not just any ordinary July 4 but the grand celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Republic. A country feeling its oats, flexing its muscles, vigorous and rich, cocksure and confident, has seen the impossible happen, the unthinkable become fact. Sitting Bull has spoiled their glorious Centennial, pissed on Custer's golden head, the head of a genuine Civil War hero, the head of someone who has recently been touted as a future President of the United States. Somehow a wedding and a funeral got booked for the same hour in the same church.

A more systematic study by Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi ‘found that among Nobel Prize laureates in the sciences, as well as those in literature, there was a remarkable degree of irreligiosity, as compared to the populations they came from’.51

Bertrand Russell was asked what he would say if he died and found himself confronted by God, demanding to know why Russell had not believed in him. ‘Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence,’ was Russell’s (I almost said immortal) reply.

The strongest language to be found in The God Delusion is tame and measured by comparison. If it sounds intemperate, it is only because of the weird convention, almost universally accepted (see the quotation from Douglas Adams here), that religious faith is uniquely privileged: above and beyond criticism. Insulting a restaurant might seem trivial compared to insulting God. But restaurateurs and chefs really exist and they have feelings to be hurt, whereas blasphemy, as the witty bumper sticker puts it, is a victimless crime.

There is, of course, another anniversary that will follow our Independence Day: your day of mourning, Nakba Day. The Palestinian catastrophe of 1948. Not of 1967, not of the occupation and the West Bank settlements, but of the founding of Israel. That is the heart of the Palestinian grievance against me. My national existence.

And like the old men who sat around the piazzetta facing the Piave memorial, we’ll speak about two young men who found much happiness for a few weeks and lived the remainder of their lives dipping cotton swabs into that bowl of happiness, fearing they’d use it up, without daring to drink more than a thimbleful on ritual anniversaries

So what you’re really saying is you’ll come only when you think you’ll be too old to care. When my kids have left. Or when I’m a grandfather. I can just see us—and on that evening, we’ll sit together and drink a strong eau-de-vie, like the grappa your father used to serve at night sometimes.” “And like the old men who sat around the piazzetta facing the Piave memorial, we’ll speak about two young men who found much happiness for a few weeks and lived the remainder of their lives dipping cotton swabs into that bowl of happiness, fearing they’d use it up, without daring to drink more than a thimbleful on ritual anniversaries.” But this thing that almost never was still beckons, I wanted to tell him. They can never undo it, never unwrite it, never unlive it, or relive it—it’s just stuck there like a vision of fireflies on a summer field toward evening that keeps saying, You could have had this instead. But going back is false. Moving ahead is false. Looking the other way is false. Trying to redress all that is false turns out to be just as false. Their life is like a garbled echo buried for all time in a sealed Mithraic chamber. Silence.

I found that I was sitting for that examination on the exact anniversary of my last shot at it—quarter of a century ago—January 16th, 1914. And what’s more, under the questions, I had scribbled, in the high spirits natural to sweet seventeen, ‘Never again! not if I know it!’ Before I returned that paper to its file,” said Miss Morrison, “I added the words, ‘First Aid taken again January 16th, 1939. I did not know.

Well then. Let us begin with essentials. Are you free to marry me?” He exhaled slowly, in a pointed effort not to hold his breath. “Of course. When I come of age, that is.” “Tell me your birthday.” She smiled. “The first of February.” “It will be our wedding day.” He traced the shape of the birthmark on her hip. “Very convenient for me, for your birthday and our anniversary to coincide. I’ll be more likely to remember both.” “I wish you would stop touching me there.” “Do you? Why?” “Because it is ugly. I hate it.” He tilted his head, surprised. “I quite adore it. It reminds me that you are imperfectly perfect and entirely mine.” He slid down her body and bent to kiss the mark to prove the point. “There’s a little thrill in knowing no one else has seen it.” “No other man, you mean.” He kissed her there again, this time tracing the shape with his tongue. She squirmed and laughed. “When I was a child, I would scrub at it in the bath. My nursemaid used to tell me, God gives children birthmarks so they won’t get lost.” Her mouth curled in a bittersweet smile. “Yet here I am, adrift on the ocean on the other side of the world. Don’t they call that irony?” “I believe they call it Providence.” He tightened his hands over her waist. “You’re here, and I’ve found you. And I take pains not to lose what’s mine.” He kissed her hip again, then slid his mouth toward her center as he settled between her thighs. “Gray,” she protested through a sigh of pleasure. “It’s late. We must rise.” “I assure you, I’ve risen.” “I’ve work to do.” She writhed in his grip. “The men will be wanting their breakfast.” “They’ll wait until the captain has finished his.” “Gray!” She gave a gasp of shock, then one of pleasure. “What a scoundrel you are.” He came to his knees and lifted her hips, sinking into her with a low groan. “Sweet,” he breathed as she began to move with him, “you would not have me any other way.

He even found time on the day of the occupation to worry about the large gold Nobel Prize medals that Max von Laue and James Franck had given him for safekeeping.1290 Exporting gold from Germany was a serious criminal offense and their names were engraved on the medals.1291, 1292 George de Hevesy devised an effective solution—literally: he dissolved the medals separately in acid. As solutions of black liquid in unmarked jars they sat out the war innocently on a laboratory shelf.

Paul Bell in Mensa Magazine in 2002 (Mensa is the society of individuals with a high IQ, and their journal not surprisingly includes articles on the one thing that draws them together).56 Bell concluded: ‘Of 43 studies carried out since 1927 on the relationship between religious belief and one’s intelligence and/or educational level, all but four found an inverse connection. That is, the higher one’s intelligence or education level, the less one is likely to be religious or hold “beliefs” of any kind.

her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

Each year, the United States issues about 70,000 patents, only a few of which ultimately reach the stage of commercial production. For each great invention that ultimately found a use, there are countless others that did not. Even inventions that meet the need for which they were initially designed may later prove more valuable at meeting unforeseen needs. While James Watt designed his steam engine to pump water from mines, it soon was supplying power to cotton mills, then (with much greater profit) propelling locomotives and boats.

He even found time on the day of the occupation to worry about the large gold Nobel Prize medals that Max von Laue and James Franck had given him for safekeeping.1290 Exporting gold from Germany was a serious criminal offense and their names were engraved on the medals.1291, 1292 George de Hevesy devised an effective solution—literally: he dissolved the medals separately in acid. As solutions of black liquid in unmarked jars they sat out the war innocently on a laboratory shelf. Afterward the Nobel Foundation recast them and returned them to their owners.

Once a device had been invented, the inventor then had to find an application for it. Only after it had been in use for a considerable time did consumers come to feel that they “needed” it. Still other devices, invented to serve one purpose, eventually found most of their use for other, unanticipated purposes. It may come as a surprise to learn that these inventions in search of a use include most of the major technological breakthroughs of modern times, ranging from the airplane and automobile, through the internal combustion engine and electric light bulb, to the phonograph and transistor. Thus, invention is often the mother of necessity, rather than vice versa.

As for this story’s theme, probably the most concise summation of it that I’ve seen appears in Kurt Vonnegut’s introduction to the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of Slaughterhouse-Five: “Stephen Hawking…found it tantalizing that we could not remember the future. But remembering the future is child’s play for me now. I know what will become of my helpless, trusting babies because they are grown-ups now. I know how my closest friends will end up because so many of them are retired or dead now…To Stephen Hawking and all others younger than myself I say, ‘Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and loves you no matter what you are.’ 

Of course, the cadavers, in life, donated themselves freely to this fate, and the language surrounding the bodies in front of us soon changed to reflect that fact. We were instructed to no longer call them “cadavers”; “donors” was the preferred term. And yes, the transgressive element of dissection had certainly decreased from the bad old days. (Students no longer had to bring their own bodies, for starters, as they did in the nineteenth century. And medical schools had discontinued their support of the practice of robbing graves to procure cadavers—that looting itself a vast improvement over murder, a means once common enough to warrant its own verb: burke, which the OED defines as “to kill secretly by suffocation or strangulation, or for the purpose of selling the victim’s body for dissection.”) Yet the best-informed people—doctors—almost never donated their bodies. How informed were the donors, then? As one anatomy professor put it to me, “You wouldn’t tell a patient the gory details of a surgery if that would make them not consent.” Even if donors were informed enough—and they might well have been, notwithstanding one anatomy professor’s hedging—it wasn’t so much the thought of being dissected that galled. It was the thought of your mother, your father, your grandparents being hacked to pieces by wisecracking twenty-two-year-old medical students. Every time I read the pre-lab and saw a term like “bone saw,” I wondered if this would be the session in which I finally vomited. Yet I was rarely troubled in lab, even when I found that the “bone saw” in question was nothing more than a common, rusty wood saw. The closest I ever came to vomiting was nowhere near the lab but on a visit to my grandmother’s grave in New York, on the twentieth anniversary of her death. I found myself doubled over, almost crying, and apologizing—not to my cadaver but to my cadaver’s grandchildren. In the midst of our lab, in fact, a son requested his mother’s half-dissected body back. Yes, she had consented, but he couldn’t live with that. I knew I’d do the same. (The remains were returned.) In

A few years after you disappeared, a postal worker named Ben Carver was sentenced to death for murdering six young men. (He is a homosexual, which, according to Huckleberry, means he is not attracted to murdering young women.) Rumors have it that Carver cannibalized some of his victims, but there was never a trial, so the more salacious details were not made public. I found Carver’s name in the sheriff’s file ten months ago, the fifth anniversary of your disappearance. The letter was written on Georgia Department of Corrections stationery and signed by the warden. He was informing the sheriff that Ben Carver, a death row inmate, had mentioned to one of the prison guards that he might have some information pertaining to your disappearance.

In fifteenth-century France, for example, one out of every four days of the year was an official holiday of some sort, usually dedicated to a mix of religious ceremonies and more or less unsanctioned carryings-on. Weddings, wakes, and other gatherings furnished additional opportunities for conviviality and carousing. Then there were the various local ceremonial occasions, such as the day honoring a village's patron saint or the anniversary of a church's founding ... So, despite the reputation of what are commonly called "the Middle Ages" as a time of misery and fear, the period from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century can be seen - at least in comparison to the puritanical times that followed - as one long outdoor party, punctuated by bouts of hard labor.

I remember my wife's birthday, but forget how old she is; I forget our anniversary date, but never forget we're married. I remember the days when women I didn't know would smile at me because they thought I was nice looking, then smile to myself because the memory of that time is enough. I especially give thanks that the phrase, "I know better" is on the tip of my tongue, Finally, I found out Christ has a sense of humor, He has some pretty cool jokes, and boy oh boy, can He tell some stories, especially stories that involve me. Growing old is not the bad thing I thought it would be, especially since growing older is still on the table. But some of those stories He tells.....damn....I didn't realize I made Him laugh so much. But I did. And that's not an entirely bad thing

The civil machinery which ensured the carrying out of this law, and the military organization which turned numbers of men into battalions and divisions, were each founded on a bureaucracy. The production of resources, in particular guns and ammunition, was a matter for civil organization. The movement of men and resources to the front, and the trench system of defence, were military concerns.” Each interlocking system was logical in itself and each system could be rationalized by those who worked it and moved through it. Thus, Elliot demonstrates, “It is reasonable to obey the law, it is good to organize well, it is ingenious to devise guns of high technical capacity, it is sensible to shelter human beings against massive firepower by putting them in protective trenches.” What was the purpose of this complex organization? Officially it was supposed to save civilization, protect the rights of small democracies, demonstrate the superiority of Teutonic culture, beat the dirty Hun, beat the arrogant British, what have you. But the men caught in the middle came to glimpse a darker truth. “The War had become undisguisedly mechanical and inhuman,” Siegfried Sassoon allows a fictional infantry officer to see. “What in earlier days had been drafts of volunteers were now droves of victims.”378 Men on every front independently discovered their victimization. Awareness intensified as the war dragged on. In Russia it exploded in revolution. In Germany it motivated desertions and surrenders. Among the French it led to mutinies in the front lines. Among the British it fostered malingering.

Over a span of twenty years, Shakespeare churned out an impressively whopping thirty-eight plays, 154 love sonnets, and two epic narrative poems. While most people associate him with his plays, it was his sonnets that likely earned him admiration among his contemporaries. Yes, that’s right: In his lifetime, Shakespeare garnered more acclaim for his sonnets than he did for his plays. In England during the 1590s, writing plays was considered a bit hackish—a way to pay the bills—and not an intellectual pursuit. Writing sonnets was all the rage— and a way to gain literary prestige. These poems weren’t published for the plebeian public, but were written down and shared among the literati—and aristocrats looking for some intellectual cachet by becoming patrons to brilliant but perhaps financially strapped writers. So, while Shakespeare likely wrote nearly all of his love sonnets in the early to mid 1590s, they weren’t officially collected and published until 1609, well after the fad had passed. W. H. Auden said of Shakespeare’s sonnets: “They are the work of someone whose ear is unerring.” In today’s less poetry-friendly world, appreciation of these sonnets tends, sadly, to be relegated to classrooms, Valentine’s Day, and anniversaries. Which is too bad, because—though they do indeed rhyme—they are far superior to the ditties found in ninety-nine-cent greeting cards. In fact, they cover the whole gamut of love—the good, the bad, the erotic, and the ugly, including love triangles, being dumped, and jealousy. There is also speculation as to how autobiographical the sonnets are. The truth is that we know so little about Shakespeare’s private life.

At that age, at that time of my life, refusal involved a kind of strategising for which I lacked the language. I didn’t understand how to negotiate my own disavowal – of food choices at a restaurant, of which movie to see, of which route to take through the city, of anything to do with sex – because I didn’t know my own desire, I didn’t know the limits and contours of my own wants, or the boundaries of my own comfort. Or how much another might press these. Because in its best sense refusal is relative, always secondary, always an after-effect of desire or predilection, or just a logical response to the insistence on self-preservation, to life and its livingness. But at that time I had no internalised repertoire of the preferences against which I could measure and assess his requests. Or if I did, I hadn’t found a way of articulating them, of expressing them, of saying with my body or otherwise: This is how I feel. This is what I want. This is what I’m going to do.

I think it’s important to reiterate here that I didn’t start out wanting to be a gardener, or a designer for that matter. It was all trial and error and figuring things out. And sometimes you’ve got to try something outside of your comfort zone to figure out what it is that you truly love. Well, you could say that about you and me right from the start. You were never looking for the loud guy, and I certainly wasn’t looking for the quiet girl. Now I look back and go, “If I would’ve ended up with that quiet guy or that stable guy or that safe guy, I would never have been able to pursue any of these dreams, because no one would have pushed me to these new places I discovered in myself.” Those other types of guys might have allowed me to stay in that safe place. They wouldn’t have drawn you out. That’s interesting. And if I had wound up with some cheerleader who was always the life of the party, I don’t think I would have found my way, either. I needed you for that. Nowadays when I think about the name Magnolia, I think about it in terms that refer to much more than the blossoming of our business. I think about the buds on the three, and how they really are just the tightest buds--they look like rocks, almost. And I feel like when Chip and I met, that tight little bud was me. I was risk averse, and in some ways, I don’t think I saw the beauty or the potential in myself. Then I wound up with Chip Gaines and-- You bloomed? I did. If I hadn’t married Chip, I might not have ever bloomed. I can’t imagine what my life would be if we hadn’t traveled this road. We celebrated our twelfth anniversary recently, and my dad said something that I thought was really beautiful. He said, “Chip, I always thought, when I was out on the baseball field hitting you those grounders, that I was training you to be the next greatest baseball player. But now, looking back and seeing the person you’ve become, I was really training you to be the next greatest dad.

Reaching into his sporran, he pulled out a small bundle wrapped in fine linen. “I want to give ye somethin’, somethin’I want ye to wear this day.”Carefully, he unfolded the linen and held his hand out to her. Josephine’s eyes widened with curiosity and joy. “’Tis beautiful, Graeme!” “It be a brooch that each MacAulay lad receives when he turns six and ten. I want ye to have it.” Josephine carefully took it and studied it closely. Made of pewter, in the center of the brooch were two hands, one decidedly masculine, the other feminine. The masculine hand held the feminine hand in his palm. In the center of her palm was a tiny ruby. To one side, the circle had been engraved to look like stars twinkling near a crescent moon. On the other were the words aeterna devotione. Eternal devotion. Tears filled her eyes as she looked into his. “Ye want me to have this?” “Aye, I do, Joie,”he said as he placed a kiss on her forehead. “Me great-great-great grandfather presented a brooch just like this to his wife, me great-great-great grandmum. But no’until the first anniversary of their weddin’day. ’Twas a symbol of the great love they had found with one another. ’Tis tradition for the MacAulay men to only give their brooch to a woman who has stolen their heart, a woman they love and trust above all else.” Tears trailed down her cheeks, her heart beating so rapidly she was certain it would burst through her breastbone at any moment. “I do no’quite understand how it happened, or how it happened so quickly, Joie, but it has. Amorem in corde meo ut arctius coccino colloeandus arctius ideo astra,”Graeme said first in Latin and then again in Gaelic, “Toisc go bhfuil do ghrá eitseáilte isteach i mo chroí i corcairdhearg, mar sin tá sé eitseáilte amonst na réaltaí.”He placed a tender kiss on her cheek. “As yer love be etched into me heart in crimson, so it be etched amongst the stars,”he told her. “As me grandda said those words to me grandmum all those many years ago, I say them to ye.

He and Powell would be celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary a few days later, and he admitted that at times he had not been as appreciative of her as she deserved. “I’m very lucky, because you just don’t know what you’re getting into when you get married,” he said. “You have an intuitive feeling about things. I couldn’t have done better, because not only is Laurene smart and beautiful, she’s turned out to be a really good person.” For a moment he teared up. He talked about his other girlfriends, particularly Tina Redse, but said he ended up in the right place. He also reflected on how selfish and demanding he could be. “Laurene had to deal with that, and also with me being sick,” he said. “I know that living with me is not a bowl of cherries.” Among his selfish traits was that he tended not to remember anniversaries or birthdays. But in this case, he decided to plan a surprise. They had gotten married at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite, and he decided to take Powell back there on their anniversary. But when Jobs called, the place was fully booked. So he had the hotel approach the people who had reserved the suite where he and Powell had stayed and ask if they would relinquish it. “I offered to pay for another weekend,” Jobs recalled, “and the man was very nice and said, ‘Twenty years, please take it, it’s yours.’” He found the photographs of the wedding, taken by a friend, and had large prints made on thick paper boards and placed in an elegant box. Scrolling through his iPhone, he found the note that he had composed to be included in the box and read it aloud: "We didn’t know much about each other twenty years ago. We were guided by our intuition; you swept me off my feet. It was snowing when we got married at the Ahwahnee. Years passed, kids came, good times, hard times, but never bad times. Our love and respect has endured and grown. We’ve been through so much together and here we are right back where we started 20 years ago—older, wiser—with wrinkles on our faces and hearts. We now know many of life’s joys, sufferings, secrets and wonders and we’re still here together. My feet have never returned to the ground."  By the end of the recitation he was crying uncontrollably. When he composed himself, he noted that he had also made a set of the pictures for each of his kids. “I thought they might like to see that I was young once.

It was 1996, and the word “appropriation” never occurred to either of them. They were drawn to these references because they loved them, and they found them inspiring. They weren’t trying to steal from another culture, though that is probably what they did. Consider Mazer in a 2017 interview with Kotaku, celebrating the twentieth-anniversary Nintendo Switch port of the original Ichigo: kotaku: It is said that the original Ichigo is one of the most graphically beautiful low-budget games ever made, but its critics also accuse it of appropriation. How do you respond to that? mazer: I do not respond to that. kotaku: Okay…But would you make the same game if you were making it now? mazer: No, because I am a different person than I was then. kotaku: In terms of its obvious Japanese references, I mean. Ichigo looks like a character Yoshitomo Nara could have painted. The world design looks like Hokusai, except for the Undead level, which looks like Murakami. The soundtrack sounds like Toshiro Mayuzumi… mazer: I won’t apologize for the game Sadie and I made. [Long pause.] We had many references—Dickens, Shakespeare, Homer, the Bible, Philip Glass, Chuck Close, Escher. [Another long pause.] And what is the alternative to appropriation? kotaku: I don’t know. mazer: The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures. kotaku: That’s an oversimplification of the issue. mazer: The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don’t you? I’m terrified of that world, and I don’t want to live in that world, and as a mixed-race person, I literally don’t exist in it. My dad, who I barely knew, was Jewish. My mom was an American-born Korean. I was raised by Korean immigrant grandparents in Koreatown, Los Angeles. And as any mixed-race person will tell you—to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing. And, by the way, I don’t own or have a particularly rich understanding of the references of Jewishness or Koreanness because I happen to be those things. But if Ichigo had been fucking Korean, it wouldn’t be a problem for you, I guess?

Dear Mom and Dad How are you? If you are reading this it means your back from the wonderful cruise my brothers and I sent you on for your anniversary. We’re sure you both had a wonderful time. We want you to know that, while you were away, we did almost everything you asked. All but one thing, that is. We killed the lawn. We killed it dead. You asked us not to and we killed it. We killed it with extreme prejudice and no regard for its planty life. We killed the lawn. Now we know what you’re thinking: “But sons, whom we love ever so much, how can this be so? We expressly asked you to care for the lawn? The exactly opposite of what you are now conveying to us in an open digital forum.” True enough. We cannot dispute this. However, we have killed the lawn. We have killed it good. We threw a party and it was quite a good time. We had a moon bounce and beer and games and pirate costumes, oh it was a good time. Were it anyone else’s party that probably would have been enough but, hey, you know us. So we got a foam machine. A frothy, wet, quite fun yet evidently deadly, foam machine. Now this dastardly devise didn’t kill the lawn per se. We hypothesize it was more that it made the lawn very wet and that dancing in said area for a great many hours over the course of several days did the deed. Our jubilant frolicking simply beat the poor grass into submission. We collected every beer cap, bottle, and can. There is not a single cigarette butt or cigar to be found. The house is still standing, the dog is still barking, Grandma is still grandmaing but the lawn is no longer lawning. Now we’re sure, as you return from your wonderful vacation, that you’re quite upset but lets put this in perspective. For one thing whose idea was it for you to leave us alone in the first place? Not your best parenting decision right there. We’re little better than baboons. The mere fact that we haven’t killed each other in years past is, at best, luck. Secondly, let us not forget, you raised us to be this way. Always pushing out limits, making sure we thought creatively. This is really as much your fault as it is ours, if not more so. If anything we should be very disappointed in you. Finally lets not forget your cruise was our present to you. We paid for it. If you look at how much that cost and subtract the cost of reseeding the lawn you still came out ahead so, really, what position are you in to complain? So let’s review; we love you, you enjoyed a week on a cruise because of us, the lawn is dead, and it’s partially your fault. Glad that’s all out in the open. Can you have dinner ready for us by 6 tonight? We’d like macaroni and cheese. Love always Peter, James & Carmine

You should date a girl who reads. Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve. Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn. She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book. Buy her another cup of coffee. Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice. It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does. She has to give it a shot somehow. Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world. Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two. Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series. If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are. You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype. You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots. Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads. Or better yet, date a girl who writes.

an excessive and unproductive deference of British physics students to their seniors. He therefore founded a club, the

In an autobiographical essay published in 1946, Albert Einstein reflected on his days as a student of physics some fifty years earlier. He recalled his teachers with affection but, referring to exams, said, “This coercion had such a deterring effect that after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.

As it happens, most studies have found that unexpected rewards are much less destructive than the rewards people are told about beforehand and are deliberately trying to obtain. But

As it happens, most studies have found that unexpected rewards are much less destructive than the rewards people are told about beforehand and are deliberately trying to obtain.

You Never Can Tell" It was a teenage wedding, and the old folks wished them well You could see that Pierre did truly love the mademoiselle And now the young monsieur and madame have rung the chapel bell, "C'est la vie", say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell They furnished off an apartment with a two room Roebuck sale The coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale, But when Pierre found work, the little money comin' worked out well "C'est la vie", say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell They had a hi-fi phono, boy, did they let it blast Seven hundred little records, all rock, rhythm and jazz But when the sun went down, the rapid tempo of the music fell "C'est la vie", say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell They bought a souped-up jitney, 'twas a cherry red '53, They drove it down New Orleans to celebrate their anniversary It was there that Pierre was married to the lovely mademoiselle "C'est la vie", say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell

Much later in his book, Hacker acknowledges the implausibility of the hypothetical posed to the White college students, a question impossible to answer since few Whites can truly imagine themselves Black. Even this implausibility, however, confirms the importance of Whiteness to Whites. No matter how degraded their lives, white people are still allowed to believe that they possess the blood, the genes, the patrimony of superiority. No matter what happens, they can never become “black.” White Americans of all classes have found it comforting to preserve blacks as a subordinate caste: a presence, which despite all its pain and problems, still provides whites with some solace in a stressful world.7

January 18th, the forty-seventh anniversary of the founding of the German Empire, brought melancholy reflections for all Germans. The Bolshevist-hued Socialists were impotently raging in defeat; the bourgeoisie lamented past glories; the Majority Socialists were under a crossfire from both sides. The Conservative Kreuz-Zeitung wrote: "January 18th: What feelings are awakened on this day under prevailing conditions! In other times we celebrated today the Empire's glory, its resurrection from impotence and dissension to unity and strength. We believed its existence and power assured for centuries. And today? After less than half a century the old misery has come upon us and has cast us down lower than ever. This time, too, Germany could be conquered only because it was disunited. In the last analysis it was from the Social-Democratic poison of Internationalism and negation of state that the Empire became infected and defenseless. How painfully wrong were those who, in smiling optimism, ever made light of all warnings against the Social-Democratic danger. It will be our real danger in the future also. If we do not overcome the Social-Democratic spirit among our people we cannot recover our health." The Kreuz-Zeitung's diagnosis was correct, but it had required a national post-mortem to establish it.

January 18th, the forty-seventh anniversary of the founding of the German Empire, brought melancholy reflections for all Germans. The Bolshevist-hued Socialists were impotently raging in defeat; the bourgeoisie lamented past glories; the Majority Socialists were under a crossfire from both sides. The Conservative Kreuz-Zeitung wrote: "January 18th: What feelings are awakened on this day under prevailing conditions! In other times we celebrated today the Empire's glory, its resurrection from impotence and dissension to unity and strength. We believed its existence and power assured for centuries. And today? After less than half a century the old misery has come upon us and has cast us down lower than ever. This time, too, Germany could be conquered only because it was disunited. In the last analysis it was from the Social-Democratic poison of Internationalism and negation of state that the Empire became infected and defenseless. How painfully wrong were those who, in smiling optimism, ever made light of all warnings against the Social-Democratic danger. It will be our real danger in the future also. If we do not overcome the Social-Democratic spirit among our people we cannot recover our health.

That evening I went over to Metro and found this long platinum-blond wig. I took it home and styled it, with curls and ringlets at the nape of the neck. The next day I brought it to Bette. She put it on, looked in the mirror, and in a loud voice said, 'It's the NUTS! I love it!' She wore it through the entire picture, and she never knew that it was an old wig of Joan's—one that Miss Crawford wore in an early M-G-M movie." Norma

suppose they began to worry about the health of the Japanese currency, the yen, in which bonds are denominated and in which the interest is paid. In such circumstances, the price of the bond would drop as nervous investors sold off their holdings. Buyers would only be found at a price low enough to compensate them for the increased risk of a Japanese default or currency depreciation.

They achieved this by learning a crucial lesson: in finance small is seldom beautiful. By making their bank bigger and more diversified than any previous financial institution, they found a way of spreading their risks. And by engaging in currency trading as well as lending, they reduced their vulnerability to defaults.

During dessert Vikki finally managed to edge in one complaint. “It was our first anniversary last month,” she said, “and do you know what my newlywed besotted husband bought me? A food processor! Me—a food processor!” “It was a hint, Viktoria.” Vikki theatrically rolled her eyes. Richter just rolled his. Trying not to smile, Alexander glanced at Tania, who was loving on her death-by-chocolate cake and hardly paying attention. She embraced electric gadgets with all her heart. There was not an electric can opener, a blender, a coffee maker that did not get his wife wildly enthusiastic. She window shopped for these items every Saturday, read their manuals in the store and then at night regaled Alexander with their technical attributes, as if the manuals she was reciting were Pushkin’s poetry. “Tania, darling, my closest friend,” said Vikki, “please tell me you agree. Don’t you think a food processor is extremely unromantic?” After thinking carefully, her mouth full, Tatiana said, “What kind of food processor?” For Christmas, Alexander bought Tatiana a Kitchen-Aid food processor, top of the line, the best on the market. Inside it she found a gold necklace. Despite a very full house, and Anthony right outside on the couch, she made love to Alexander that Christmas night in candlelight wearing nothing but the necklace, perched and posted on top of him, her soft silken hair floating in a mane and her warm breasts swinging into his chest.

The view of Ukrainians as constituents of the Russian nation goes back to the founding myth of modern Russia as a nation conceived and born in Kyiv, the “mother of Russian [rather than Rus’] cities.” The Synopsis of 1674, the first printed “textbook” of Russian history, compiled by Kyivan monks seeking the protection of the Muscovite tsars, first formulated and widely disseminated this myth in Russia. Throughout most of the imperial period, Ukrainians were regarded as Little Russians—a vision that allowed for the existence of Ukrainian folk culture and spoken vernacular but not a high culture or a modern literature. Recognition of Ukrainians as a distinct nation in cultural but not political terms in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1917 challenged that vision. The aggression of 2014, backed by the ideology of the “Russian World,” offers Ukrainians today a throwback in comparison with Soviet practices. Nation building as conceived in a future New Russia makes no provision for a separate Ukrainian ethnicity within a broader Russian nation. This is hardly an oversight or excess born of the heat of battle. Less than a year before the annexation of the Crimea, Vladimir Putin himself went on record claiming that Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same people. He repeated that statement in a speech delivered on March 18, 2015, to mark the first anniversary of the annexation of the Crimea. Since the fall of the USSR, the Russian nation-building project has switched its focus to the idea of forming a single Russian nation not divided into branches and unifying the Eastern Slavs on the basis of the Russian language and culture. Ukraine has become the first testing ground for this model outside the Russian Federation.

One sign that you have found the characteristics of your heart is when your passion, purpose, talents and pain all come together and begin defining who you are.

We are evolving from five-sensory humans into multisensory humans. Our five senses, together, form a single sensory system that is designed to perceive physical reality. The perceptions of a multisensory human extend beyond physical reality to the larger dynamical systems of which our physical reality is a part. The multisensory human is able to perceive, and to appreciate, the role that our physical reality plays in a larger picture of evolution, and the dynamics by which our physical reality is created and sustained. This realm is invisible to the five-sensory human. It is in this invisible realm that the origins of our deepest values are found. From the perspective of this invisible realm, the motivations of those who consciously sacrifice their lives for higher purposes make sense, the power of Gandhi is explicable, and the compassionate acts of the Christ are comprehensible in a fullness that is not accessible to the five-sensory human. All of our great teachers have been, or are, multisensory humans. They have spoken to us and acted in accordance with perceptions and values that reflect the larger perspective of the multisensory being, and, therefore, their words and actions awaken within us the recognition of truths.

Of course you are. One of you lot comes and finds me every year around the anniversary. Still haven’t found her though, have you?’ he asked, taking a sip of his beer.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them. Robert Oppenheimer

Bohr responded: “But if anybody says he can think about quantum problems without getting giddy, that only shows that he has not understood the first thing about them.”556 Much later, Oppenheimer once told an audience, Bohr was listening to Pauli talking about a new theory on which he had recently been attacked. “And Bohr asked, at the end, ‘Is this really crazy enough? The quantum mechanics was really crazy.’ And Pauli said, ‘I hope so, but maybe not quite.’ ”557 Bohr’s understanding of how crazy discovery must be clarifies why Oppenheimer sometimes found himself unable to push alone into the raw original

Einstein preferred to review a letter to the President in person. Teller therefore delivered Szilard to Peconic, probably on Sunday, July 30, in his sturdy 1935 Plymouth.1183 “I entered history as Szilard’s chauffeur,” Teller aphorizes the experience.1184 They found the Princeton laureate in old clothes and slippers. Elsa Einstein served tea.

Wigner told me of Hahn’s discovery.1030 Hahn found that uranium breaks into two parts when it absorbs a neutron. . . . When I heard this I immediately saw that these fragments, being heavier than corresponds to their charge, must emit neutrons, and if enough neutrons are emitted . . . then it should be, of course, possible to sustain a chain reaction. All the things which H. G. Wells predicted appeared suddenly real to me.

Hanford, says Marshall, “was a tough town. There was nothing to do after work except fight, with the result that occasionally bodies were found in garbage cans the next morning.”1902 Du Pont built saloons with windows hinged for easy tear-gas lobbing. Eventually some 5,000 construction workers struggled in the desert dust and Du Pont built more than two hundred barracks to house them. Meat rationing stopped at the edge of the reservation; there were no meatless Tuesdays in the vast Hanford mess halls, a significant enticement for recruiting

This time,” he told Weil, “take the control rod out twelve inches.” Weil withdrew the cadmium rod. Fermi nodded and ZIP was winched out as well. “This is going to do it,” Fermi told Compton. The director of the plutonium project had found a place for himself at Fermi’s side. “Now it will become self-sustaining. The trace [on the recorder] will climb and continue to climb; it will not level off.

A major field for religious donations is the support of important periodic rites. These are often held in conjunction with calendrical festivals and also on the founding anniversaries of temples. They are frequently occasions for the display of great wealth. Truly startling sums are often paid in the auctions held to determine who will have the honor of supporting particular parts of the ceremony or of assuming specific ceremonial roles. This aspect of sponsorship seems to function as a public validation of who's who in the wealth and power hierarchies of the Jain community.

Did I miss something important?” I asked worriedly. What if we were invited to some sort of Camorra gala and I had forgotten? Savio probably found it funny to give me a heart attack like that. “Do you know what today is?” I blinked, trying to remember. It wasn’t our wedding anniversary, and not the anniversary of our engagement either. No birthday either.

find out what you truly love to do and then direct all of your energy towards doing it. If you study the happiest, healthiest, most satisfied people of our world, you will see that each and every one of them has found their passion in life, and then spent their days pursuing it.

TRUTH It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them. Robert Oppenheimer It is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a sheet of paper could change the course of human affairs. Stanislaw Ulam

He was not so unlucky in legend as the Oxford physicist Frederick Smith, who found that photographic plates kept near a cathode-ray tube were liable to be fogged and merely told his assistant to move them to another place.131

JAKE: They found out the first killing was on the anniversary of your parents’ first date. And they also learned the women had all the same features as your mother.

And so in the 1960s organizations like the Black Panther Party were created. (And I should say the Black Panther Party was founded in 1966, which means that there should be a fiftieth anniversary celebration coming up!) I wonder how we are going to address, for example, the Ten-Point Program of the Black Panther Party. I’ll just summarize the Ten-Point Program and you might get an idea why there are not efforts under way to guarantee a large fiftieth anniversary celebration for the Black Panther Party. Number one was “We want freedom.” Two, full employment. Three, an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our Black and oppressed communities—it was anticapitalist! Number four, we want decent housing, fit for the shelter of human beings. Number five, we want decent education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in present-day society. And number six—which is especially significant in relation to the right-wing effort to undo the very small efforts made by the Obama administration to produce health care for poor people in the US—we want completely free health care for all Black and oppressed people. Number seven, we want an immediate end to police brutality and the murder of Black people, other people of color, and all oppressed people inside the United States. Number eight, we want an immediate end to all wars of aggression—you see how current this still sounds. Number nine, we want freedom for all Black and oppressed people now held in US federal, state, county, city, and military prisons and jails. We want trials by a jury of peers for all persons charged with so-called crimes under the laws of this country. And finally, number ten: we want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace, and people’s community control of modern technology.

though I was born out of a tragedy, she found beauty in me, and she’d given up so much for me to chase my dreams.

All I could see was Brad’s face, his smile, his trusting eyes. He would be so hurt if he found out what happened. The man who saved me from myself, and I repaid him by falling back into bed with the man who broke me in the first place. So fucking stupid.

The healthiest fats are mono- and polyunsaturated fats, mainly found in plant and fish oils.

But you will not have illusory expectations that anything or anybody in the future will save you or make you happy. [...] Yet on a deeper level you are already complete, and when you realize that, there is a playful, joyous energy behind what you do. [...] You no longer pursue your goals with grim determination, driven by fear, anger, discontent, or the need to become someone. Nor will you remain inactive through fear of failure, which to the ego is loss of self. When your deeper sense of self is derived from Being, when you are free of "becoming" as a psychological need, neither your happiness nor your sense of self depends on the outcome, and so there is freedom from fear. You don't seek permanency where it cannot be found: in the world of form, of gain and loss, birth and death. You don't demand that situations, conditions, places, or people should make you happy, and then suffer when they don't live up to your expectations. Everything is honored, but nothing matters.

When we'd arrived in Céreste, our neighbor Arnaud said we should go to the Musée de Salagon, in Mane. In addition to its twelfth-century church and Gallo-Roman ruins, the museum has a wonderful medieval garden. The monks used these herbs to heal as well as to flavor. I've met many people in Provence who use herbal remedies, not because it's trendy, but because it's what their grandmothers taught them. My friend Lynne puts lavender oil on bug bites to reduce the swelling; I recently found Arnaud on his front steps tying small bundles of wild absinthe, which he burns to fumigate the house. Many of the pharmacies in France still sell licorice root for low blood pressure. We drink lemon verbena herbal tea for digestion. I also like the more poetic symbolism of the herbs. I'm planting sage for wisdom, lavender for tenderness (and, according to French folklore, your forty-sixth wedding anniversary), rosemary for remembrance. Thyme is for courage, but there is also the Greek legend that when Paris kidnapped Helen of Troy, each tear that fell to the ground sprouted a tuft of thyme. All things being equal, I prefer courage to tears in my pot roast.

had to realize that my own worries about what I did were valid and were important, but that they were not the whole story, that there must be a complementary way of looking at them, because other people did not see them as I did.2146 And I needed what they saw, and needed them.” Certainly he found the more traditional alleviation of losing himself in work.

As Israel marks the sixtieth anniversary of its founding, Canadian Zionists have much to celebrate. Throughout the nation-building process Canadian Jews and non-Jews have been instrumental in helping to fulfill Zionism's six main achievements: • re-establishing Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish homeland; • offering a welcoming home to Holocaust survivors, refugees from Arab lands, and other oppressed Jews; • returning the Jews to history, transforming Jews' image rom the world's victims to actors on history's stage, with rights and responsibilities; • building a Western-style capitalist democracy with a strong Jewish flavour and a dynamic Jewish culture; • reviving and modernizing Hebrew; • making Israel a central force in revitalizing Jewish secular and religious life in the Jewish homeland and abroad.

There is evidence to support claims that 962 years prior to Columbus setting foot in the Bahamas, Saint Brendan, an Irish monastic priest known as “Saint Brendan the Navigator,” looked for the “Isle of the Blessed.” What island he found has been lost to history and is still unknown; however, legend names it “Saint Brendan’s Island.” Many believe that in his journeys across the Atlantic Ocean he actually landed in America in 1150, or 342 years prior to Columbus’ discovery.” Note: Saint Patrick ’s Day was the day of my parent’s anniversary.

Take the initiative with deliberate steps to be a polite person: 1. Cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze. 2. Reciprocate a thoughtful word or a good deed in kind. 3. Say "excuse me" when you bump into someone, unintentionally violate someone’s space, or need to get someone’s attention. 4. Apologize when you’ve made a mistake or are in the wrong. 5. Live by the "Golden Rule" and treat others the way you would like to be treated. 6. When dining at home or in a restaurant, wait until everyone is served before eating your meal. 7. Acknowledge notable events like birthdays, weddings, and anniversaries. 8. Reply to invitations, regardless of whether you will be able to attend. 9. Acknowledge and show gratitude for gifts and gestures of hospitality. 10. Put things back where they belong. Leave the world a better place than how you found it.

That same week, I found a letter written by Fr. Jose Carballo, OFM, the former minister general of the Order of Friars Minor and the current secretary for the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, to the Poor Clares on their eight hundredth year anniversary. Fr. Carballo writes: If there is anything that destroys our fraternities it is the pretension of being above others, becoming judges of our brothers and sisters. This is due to our projecting onto them our dreams, and we demand of God and others that they fulfill them. Loving our dream of fraternity more than real fraternity, we turn into destroyers of fraternity. We begin to be accusers of our brothers, and then we accuse God, and finally we become desperate accusers of ourselves. We must remember that there will never exist the ideal fraternity that can accept our dreams of pretentious pride, and that the fraternity is built on the basis of pardon and reconciliation, since it has so much to do with our own limitations and those of others.

After meeting you I felt relieved”: Who wouldn’t want to hear this kind of comment? When we receive it, it’s because we have been harmless, and our innate capacity to comfort other people, maybe heal their wounds, found no obstacle on its way. Every human being potentially has this capacity. Just our presence, if we do not judge, if we do not give advice and do not invade, can in all likelihood be beneficial for anyone who is suffering.

In 1839, former president John Quincy Adams delivered a speech before the New-York Historical Society to mark the fiftieth anniversary of George Washington’s inauguration. At seventy-one, Adams was the last living link to the founding generation. But now he had a sober message for the American people: “If the day should ever come, (may Heaven avert it,) when the affections of the people of these states shall be alienated from each other; when the fraternal spirit shall give away to cold indifference, or collisions of interest shall fester into hatred,” Adams said, “… far better will it be for the people of the disunited states, to part in friendship from each other, than to be held together by constraint.

September 1937, and for its fiftieth anniversary edition Rayner Unwin suggested to me that it would be of interest to include in it some unpublished or little known illustrations by my father, and also one of three manuscript sheets (each written on both sides, making six pages in all) that alone survive today of the original draft of the first chapter, An Unexpected Party. This particular sheet was preserved, no doubt, because on it there was also the first sketch of Thror’s Map. This preface is mostly concerned with this text and with pictures and designs; an account of the writing of The Hobbit (or what can be known of it) and the story of its publication are given by Humphrey Carpenter in J.R.R.Tolkien: A Biography, pp. 177-82. On the now very battered manuscript sheet reproduced on the following pages my father afterwards wrote: ‘Only page preserved of the first scrawled copy of The Hobbit which did not reach beyond the first chapter.’1 Since the writing is indeed a scrawl and very hard to read, I set it out in print here. The text will be found to correspond, with

It’s part of the drug problem, part of ignorance and AIDS, part of homelessness and alienation,” she declared in 1990 in her commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania, celebrating its 250th anniversary. She cited Benjamin Franklin, who had founded the school. “When Ben Franklin was dining in Paris, one of his companions posed the question: ‘What condition of man most deserves pity?’ Each guest proposed an example. When Franklin’s turn came, he offered: ‘a lonesome man on a rainy

life. She leaned back in her chair, blinked back a tear and looked at her oak dining room table. The evening had taken her several hours to prepare. She concentrated on the two candles in the center. She watched as the flame flickered and wondered if one of them would go out. She heard the grandfather clock chime and one of the candles finally did burn out. More tears were stinging her eyes as she longingly looked at the door. She was becoming disconsolate and wanted to know what had become of her husband. Even on the most chaotic of days he had never forgotten their anniversary. He had always found a way

I’ve a good life here, with Molly and Patience and the boys. There’s honest work to keep me busy, and my idle time is enjoyed with those I love. Web, I don’t doubt your wisdom and experience, but I also don’t doubt my own heart. I don’t need more than I have right now.” He looked into my eyes. I met his gaze. My last utterance was almost true. If I could have my wolf back again, then, yes, life would have been much sweeter. If I could have opened my door, and found the Fool grinning on my doorstep, then my life would have been full indeed. But there was no point in sighing after what I could not have. It only distracted me from what I did have, and that was more than I’d ever had in my life. A home, my lady, youngsters growing to manhood under my roof, and the comforts of my own bed at night. Just enough consultations from Buckkeep Castle that I could feel I was still needed in the greater world, yet few enough that I knew, truly, they could get by without me and let me have a measure of peace. I had anniversaries I could be proud of. It was nearly eight years that Molly had been my wife. It was almost ten years since I’d killed anyone. Almost ten years since I’d last seen the Fool. And there it was, that stone-dropping-into-a-well plunge of my heart. I kept it from showing on my face or in my eyes. That gulf, after all, had nothing to do with how long I’d gone with no animal companion. That was a different sort of loneliness entirely. Wasn’t it? Perhaps not. The loneliness that can never be filled by anyone except the one whose loss created the absence; well, then perhaps it was the same.

I’ve sometimes found it difficult to mark the passage of time in my own life. Being untethered, thrilling though it often is, also means being unstuck in time for much of the time. I’m disconnected from nearly every ritual commonly used to mark progress and worthiness: engagement parties, weddings, baby showers, children’s birthdays, children’s school years, marriage anniversaries, Mother’s Day.