Gas Mask Quotes

I'll be your mess, you be mine That was the deal that we had signed I bought a hazmat suit to clean up your waste Gas masks, gloves, to keep us safe But now I'm alone in an empty room Staring down immaculate doom "Messy

Uh-oh,' said Gazzy, but Angel was so nauseated she didn't have time to leap to a safe distance, or grab a gas mask Bbbbbrrrrrrrttthhhhhhttttttt. 'Mother of God, no!' Total cried, doing a fast belly-crawl to the pool and throwing himself in. 'You said it wasn't your digestive system!' 'What was that?' Dylan asked. He winced and threw an arm oer his nose and mouth. ... 'Sorry,' Gazzy said miserably, but he couldn't help a tiny grin. Nudge was clawing at a stack of towels to cover her face. 'Nice one, Gaz,' said Iggy. ... 'Wait-that was Gazzy? Is that why you call him...Oh, crap,' Dylan said weakly.

As the great poet wrote, ‘To thine own self be true.’…What? You don’t think a Skotos can be literate? I happen to love Shakespeare. Hamlet is one of my faves. (Zeth) I’m not touching that one with tongs and a gas mask. (Jericho)

Amy was profoundly shocked. "A little over an hour ago, our bus was attacked by three men in ski masks. They definitely knew me, and probably Dan, too. We fought them off, but it could've gone either way." "Like if they'd used a cookie truck instead of a gas tanker," Dan added. "Nobody's scared of Oreos.

I think I just inhaled a cloud. That’s what I get for not wearing a gas mask while riding my Pegasus.

That was the only thing that had got him through the four years of blood and madness: Know exactly where your gun is when you doze for ten minutes in your dugout; always check your gas mask; see that your men have understood their orders to the letter. You don't think ahead in years or months: you think about this hour and maybe the next. Anything else is speculation" p. 33

We had stretched out our arms to each other and supported something in our joined hands, but this thing we were holding was like a sort of gas that exists when you believe in its existence and disappears when you doubt. The task of supporting it seems simple at first glance, but actually requires an ultimate refinement of calculation and a consummate skill.

I lit my loneliness on fire like it was a cigarette. But I didn’t smoke it, because that would have required me to remove my gas mask. And what kind of sensible girl is going to be attracted to a guy out in public not wearing his gas mask?

The most central and irrational faith among people is the faith in technology and economical growth. Its priests believe until their death that material prosperity bring enjoyment and happiness - even though all the proofs in history have shown that only lack and attempt cause a life worth living, that the material prosperity doesn't bring anything else than despair. These priests believe in technology still when they choke in their gas masks.

It did not seem possible that Wendy Wright had been born out of blood and internal organs like other people. In proximity to her he felt himself to be a squat, oily, sweating, uneducated nurt whose stomach rattled and whose breath wheezed. Near her he became aware of the physical mechanisms which kept him alive; within him machinery, pipes and valves and gas-compressors and fan belts had to chug away at a losing task, a labor ultimately doomed. Seeing her face, he discovered that his own consisted of a garish mask; noticing her body made him feel like a low-class wind-up toy.

Diane, in Jackie's mind, looked just like a woman who would be an active PTA mom, with her kind face and comfortable clothing. She also thought Diane looked like a woman who would be a loan officer, with her conservative makeup choices and serious demeanor. She would look like a pharmacist if she ever were to wear the standard white coat, gas mask, and hip waders.

There was so much testosterone in the air, I felt like I needed a gas mask.

oh, good, Pestilence is free," said Karou, heading towards the sculpture. Massive emperor and horse both wore gas masks, like every other statue in the place, and it had always put Karou in mind of the first horseman of the Apocalypse, Pestilence, sowing plaque with one outstretched arm.

Plasma blasts scald asphalt; napalm blasts parch macadam (glass shards act as haphazard abradants that sandblast all landwrack)...A mad labman at a lab crafts an anthrax gas that can waft past all walls at a stalag and harm war camps that lack standard gas masks.

In time, that festival of flesh is going to inspire a butt-horn serenade, and Jergen lacks a gas mask.

If the choice is dying from COVID-19 or surviving by wearing a hazmat suit, a gas mask and goggles to the shops, I choose the latter.

I'm not touching that one with tongs and a gas mask." "-Jericho

There was plenty going on in and around the town. With the War Effort there used to be parties and dances, travelling circuses, fairs, cinemas and the like to cheer people up. There weren’t many men about. “Our boys are away fighting” the women used to say. Things went onto rationing and everyone was given a gas mask. Mine was a pink one called a Mickey Mouse mask.

The gas mask keeps me looking like any other tagger - skinny, fast, and vaguely male. Someone would have to be pretty close to tell I'm a girl, and frankly, no one ever gets that close.

In shelters, the danger posed by poison gas was a particular concern. People were encouraged to wear their gas masks for thirty minutes a day, so that they would grow accustomed to their use.

Aerial bombardment is likely between the hours of eight and ten of the clock. All noncombatant residents should report to their designated shelters. Bring your gas masks. Repeat, bring your gas masks.

When I was wearing a hazmat suit and a gas mask to shop in the USA during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was surprised everyone at the stores I would go to would treat me like a normal customer.

When I was wearing a hazmat suit and a gas mask to shop in the USA during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was surprised I was never challenged by anyone for my identity or refused entry to the store.

I’ll be your mess, you be mine That was the deal that we had signed I bought a hazmat suit to clean up your waste Gas masks, gloves, to keep us safe But now I’m alone in an empty room Staring down immaculate doom

Is that constitutional?” “I don’t know, and frankly at this stage, what does it matter? Either this will work and everyone will be too relieved afterwards to quibble, or it won’t and they will be too busy trying on gas masks to care.

Of course, the way they put it, the idea was if we had to buy our gas masks and bomb shelters we’d take better care of them. As if we ever damaged telephones and sidewalks. Or highways, because the whole state provided them. Or armies.

It’s also probably fair to say she was probably too young at thirteen to innocently open the drawer under his bed and come across a leather gas mask type thing with a leather dick attached where she presumed a nose should be, along with associated whips, gels, handcuffs and other unexplainable objects Unfortunately, once seen, never unseen and it was a lesson for her at a young age that you never know people until you’ve been through their drawers and computer history

Never mind gas masks and fallout shelters in the event of biological warfare. Many New Yorkers move from place to place equipped with the essentials of vermin assault weaponry: mouse traps, roach spray, and sticky tapes. In some neighborhoods, it’s a must.

It was October 2001 and I lived in New York City. I was twenty-two. I, like many of my female friends, suffered from a strange combination of post-9/11 anxiety and height-of-Sex-and-the-City anxiety. They are distinct and unnerving anxieties. The questions that ran through my mind went something like this: Should I keep a gas mask in my kitchen? Am I supposed to be able to afford Manolo Blahnik shoes? What is Barneys New York? You’re trying to tell me a place called “Barneys” is fancy? Where are the fabulous gay friends I was promised? Gay guys hate me! Is this anthrax or powdered sugar? Help! Help!

It was October 2001 and I lived in New York City. I was twenty two. I, like many of my female friends, suffered from a strange combination of post 9/11 anxiety and height of Sex and the City anxiety. They are distinct and unnerving anxieties. The questions that ran through my ming were something like this: 'Should I keep a gas mask in my kitchen? Am I supposed to be able to afford Manolo Blahnik shoes? What is Barneys New York? You're trying to tell me a place called 'Barney's' is fancy?'Where are the fabulous gay friends that I was promised? Gay guys hate me! Is this anthrax or powdered sugar? Help! Help!

How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing. It seems still more impossible that a quarrel which has already been settled in principle should be the subject of war.

Over the years I have read many, many books about the future, my ‘we’re all doomed’ books, as Connie liked to call them. ‘All the books you read are either about how grim the past was or how gruesome the future will be. It might not be that way, Douglas. Things might turn out all right.’ But these were well-researched, plausible studies, their conclusions highly persuasive, and I could become quite voluble on the subject. Take, for instance, the fate of the middle-class, into which Albie and I were born and to which Connie now belongs, albeit with some protest. In book after book I read that the middle-class are doomed. Globalisation and technology have already cut a swathe through previously secure professions, and 3D printing technology will soon wipe out the last of the manufacturing industries. The internet won’t replace those jobs, and what place for the middle-classes if twelve people can run a giant corporation? I’m no communist firebrand, but even the most rabid free-marketeer would concede that market-forces capitalism, instead of spreading wealth and security throughout the population, has grotesquely magnified the gulf between rich and poor, forcing a global workforce into dangerous, unregulated, insecure low-paid labour while rewarding only a tiny elite of businessmen and technocrats. So-called ‘secure’ professions seem less and less so; first it was the miners and the ship- and steel-workers, soon it will be the bank clerks, the librarians, the teachers, the shop-owners, the supermarket check-out staff. The scientists might survive if it’s the right type of science, but where do all the taxi-drivers in the world go when the taxis drive themselves? How do they feed their children or heat their homes and what happens when frustration turns to anger? Throw in terrorism, the seemingly insoluble problem of religious fundamentalism, the rise of the extreme right-wing, under-employed youth and the under-pensioned elderly, fragile and corrupt banking systems, the inadequacy of the health and care systems to cope with vast numbers of the sick and old, the environmental repercussions of unprecedented factory-farming, the battle for finite resources of food, water, gas and oil, the changing course of the Gulf Stream, destruction of the biosphere and the statistical probability of a global pandemic, and there really is no reason why anyone should sleep soundly ever again. By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, overcrowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to barely be remarked upon. Meanwhile, in literally gilded towers miles above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 per cent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepreneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept cocktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere, down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Albie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat.

The whole country had gone through a spasm of shudders during those eight months, but she had hardly noticed. The marches, the cops in their crash helmets and gas masks, the mounting attacks on the press by Agnew, the Kent State shootings, the summer of violence as blacks and radical groups took to the streets—those things might have happened on some TV late show.

After that I dumped earth only along the other two sides; working more slowly and donning my gas-mask as the smell grew. I was nearly unnerved at my proximity to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit.

People were encouraged to wear their gas masks for thirty minutes a day, so that they would grow accustomed to their use. Children took part in gas-attack drills. “All the little children of five have Mickey Mouse gas-masks,” wrote Diana Cooper in her diary. “They love putting them on for drill and at once start trying to kiss each other, then they march into their shelter singing: ‘There’ll always be an England.

He thought of the feeling of receiving oxygen from a mask and the calming sensation it brought, partly because of the concentrated gas but partly too because he could hear his muffled lungs expelling their product within the mask, and it reminded him that he was breathing, that the gas was flowing at all times but most importantly at that moment, a constant and essential truth. His lips and lungs and teeth were witness to the passage of breath.

He stowed a bottle of a local rotgut called Five Island Gin—nicknamed Five Ulcer Gin—in radioman Harry Brooks’s gas mask holster. When an MP tapped Brooks’s hip to check for the mask, the bottle broke and left Brooks with a soggy leg. It was probably for the best. Louie noticed that when he drank the stuff, his chest hair spontaneously fell out. He later discovered that Five Island Gin was often used as paint thinner. After that, he stuck to beer.

In shelters, the danger posed by poison gas was a particular concern. People were encouraged to wear their gas masks for thirty minutes a day, so that they would grow accustomed to their use. Children took part in gas-attack drills. "All the little children of five have Mickey Mouse gasmasks," wrote Diana Cooper in her diary. "They love putting them on for drill and at once start trying to kiss each other, then they march into their shelter singing: 'There'll always be an England.

Climbing along the blade of the summit ridge, sucking gas into my ragged lungs, I enjoyed a strange, unwarranted sense of calm. The world beyond the rubber mask was stupendously vivid but seemed not quite real, as if a movie were being projected in slow motion across the front of my goggles. I felt drugged, disengaged, thoroughly insulated from external stimuli. I had to remind myself over and over that there was 7,000 feet of sky on either side, that everything was at stake here, that I would pay for a single bungled step with my life. Half

It’s time to pack your gear, Kicker,” her father announced, forcing a boisterous grin. “We’re moving to South Korea!” Yup. There it was. Megan went into free fall. Her internal organs turned weightless and started floating around inside her body cavity. She clutched the arms on the chair so tightly her knuckles turned white, just to keep from throwing up. “What?” Megan blurted. Her voice sounded very far away. “It’s been a while since we were transferred, hasn’t it?” her father said matter-of-factly. “This should be exciting.” Exciting? Had he been testing gas masks over at the base today?

The train company does not have that much to carry, but the rest of us are loaded down like pack animals—we carry the full kit with blanket and ground sheet, steel helmet and heavy winter coat thrown over it. We have a full ammunition pouch on the belt, on our backs the kitbag with the field canteen, and on the other side the folded entrenching tool. A gas mask is slung around our necks, resting on the chest, and the heavy rifle swings back and forth from its strap round the neck. Lastly, a ditty bag is carried in one hand, filled with clean socks, underwear and similar items. The whole lot weighs about 40lb.

Is everything okay?" "Yeah, yeah, probably. I just wanted to mention--and it's probably no big deal--but there's a guy hanging out near the gas station staring at me." "Nothing illegal about staring." "Yeah, you're right. It's just that, well, he's wearing a mask." "It is Halloween, you know." "You're right. It's just that, he's standing out in the rain wearing this long blue raincoat." "That's what raincoats are for." "Yeah, I guess you've got a good point. It's just that, he's really creeping me out and I think he's like eight feet tall and his arms go down to his knees." There was a short pause on the other line. Then, "That's not illegal.

Now when he closes his eyes he can really look at himself. He no longer sees a mask. He sees without seeing, to be exact. Vision without sight, a fluid grasp of intangibles: the merging of sight and sound: the heart of the web. Here stream the different personalities which evade the crude contact of the senses; here the overtones of recognition discreetly lap against one another in bright, vibrant harmonies. There is no language employed, no outlines delineated. When a ship founders, it settles slowly; the spars, the masts, the rigging float away. On the ocean floor of death the bleeding hull bedecks itself with jewels; remorselessly the anatomic life begins. What was ship becomes the nameless indestructible. Like ships, men founder time and again. Only memory saves them from complete dispersion. Poets drop their stitches in the loom, straws for drowning men to grasp as they sink into extinction. Ghosts climb back on watery stairs, make imaginary ascents, vertiginous drops, memorize numbers, dates, events, in passing from gas to liquid and back again. There is no brain capable of registering the changing changes. Nothing happens in the brain, except the gradual rust and detrition of the cells. But in the minds, worlds unclassified, undenominated, unassimilated, form, break, unite, dissolve and harmonize ceaselessly. In the mind-world ideas are the indestructible elements which form the jewelled constellations of the interior life. We move within their orbits, freely if we follow their intricate patterns, enslaved or possessed if we try to subjugate them.

In Superman number one, published in 1939, Clark and Lois Lane travel to a thinly disguised Nazi Germany, where Lois ends up in front of a firing squad, until Superman rescues her. In Superman number two, also from 1939, Clark Kent visits faux Germany again and meets Adolphus Runyan, a scientist clearly modeled on Adolf Hitler, who has discovered a gas so powerful “it is capable of penetrating any type of gas-mask.” The front cover of Captain Americanumber one, published in March 1941, shows the hero smashing Hitler across the face.

And I've got good news for you! This gospel of clean and aggressive strength is spreading everywhere in this country among the finest type of youth. Why today, in 1936, there's less than 7 per cent of collegiate institutions that do not have military-training units under discipline as rigorous as the Nazis, and where once it was forced upon them by the authorities, now it is the strong young men and women who themselves demand the right to be trained in warlike virtues and skill—for, mark you, the girls, with their instruction in nursing and the manufacture of gas masks and the like, are becoming every whit as zealous as their brothers. And all the really thinking type of professors are right with 'em! "Why, here, as recently as three years ago, a sickeningly big percentage of students were blatant pacifists, wanting to knife their own native land in the dark. But now, when the shameless fools and the advocates of Communism try to hold pacifist meetings—why, my friends, in the past five months, since January first, no less than seventy-six such exhibitionistic orgies have been raided by their fellow students, and no less than fifty-nine disloyal Red students have received their just deserts by being beaten up so severely that never again will they raise in this free country the bloodstained banner of anarchism! That, my friends, is NEWS!

Back to Copper Cliff: on the eastern limit of the town, really not a defined edge, the town ended, and a few feet later the smelter—the the heart of Inco’s operations in the Sudbury area—rose up. Huge buildings humming and whining, acre after acre of industrial devastation, hot metal and slag cars to-ing and fro-ing. Row upon row of blast furnaces, molten metal being carried in giant ladles the size of small submarines by overhead moving cranes, with bits of white-hot crap falling out of them, and the mind-numbing hiss of mighty industrial production, punctuated by warning horns, and all viewed through a smog of sulphur dioxide so potent that it would sting your eyes, nose and throat to the point of tears. Workers wore “gas masks” that were little more than cloth nose and mouth covers, dipped in some solution intended to neutralize the paralyzing acidity of sulphur dioxide. They did not work. My dad worked here, and when he later became a shift boss in the Orford building and I was a summer student at Inco, he showed me through this inferno (not Dante’s; that’s only in fiction). This was the real deal and the guys who worked there pretty much all succumbed to some form of lung disease—emphysema, cancer, COPD, you name it—anything you can get from inhaling eight hours a day, five days a week, concentrated S02 and S03, not to mention the particulate crap that filled the air.

Then there was the time when he picked up a two-by-four on the side of the road and put it in the front seat by me and stuck it out the window. He told me to hold it, which I did, but when the wind hit the board, it turned around and hit me in the head and knocked me out. Another time, when a friend of Daddy’s bought a brand-new Buick, Daddy pressed the push-button window up on my neck. But that time I think it was just a matter of him not being familiar with the equipment. The main thing Momma bases her theory on is once Daddy, who is very artistic, wanted to make a life mask of my face. He put plaster of paris on me but forgot the breathing holes. On top of that he also forgot to put Vaseline on my face. He had to crack the plaster off with a hammer. Momma didn’t speak to him for a week on that one. I myself was sorry that it didn’t turn out. She also says he is going to ruin my nervous system because of the time he sneaked up on me when I was listening to Inner Sanctum on the radio. Just as the squeaking door opened, he grabbed me and yelled, “Got ya,” real loud, which caused me to faint. She also didn’t like him telling me Santa Claus had been killed in a bus accident and making me throw up. The Pettibones have very delicate nervous systems. That’s true. Momma is nervous all the time. She’s worn a hole in the floor on the passenger’s side of Daddy’s car from putting on the brakes. Momma always looks like she is on the verge of a hissy fit, but that’s mainly because when she was eighteen, she stuck her head in a gas oven looking at some biscuits and blew her eyebrows off. So she paints them on like little half-moons. People love to talk to her because she always looks interested, even if she isn’t.

The Fable of the Comet and the Moon I have betrothed the O so inconstant moon, with a band of six of Saturn's seven rings, leaving the gas giant's last ring unpilfered as a cosmic lagniappe. The astrological charts cautioned me against such a star-crossed marriage, but I, being a headstrong comet hung with an enormous tail, and impetuous Luna, being a headlong stellar slut (satellites known to be as submissive as Asians for the right price), well, we both threw caution to the solar winds. Our wedding proceeded on cycle, with Luna luminescent and draped in silvery white (the craters of her complexion conveniently masked behind a veil of clouds). It was downhill from day one, Luna losing a sliver of herself every night and bit by bit revealing to me her dark side. Luna and I went our separate elliptical ways after a domestic disturbance where I called her a professional tailgater. and she called me a dirty snowball.

By posing climate change as a battle between capitalism and the planet, I am not saying anything that we don't already know. the battle is already under way, but right now capitalism is winning hands down. it wins every time the need for economic growth is used as the excuse for putting off climate action yet again, of for breaking emission reduction commitments already made. it wins when Greeks are told that their only path out of economic crises is to open up their beautiful seas to high-risk oil and gas drilling. it wins when Canadians are told our only hope of not ending unlike Greece is to allow our boreal forests to be flayed so we can access the semisolid bitumen from the Alberta tar sands . it wins when a park in Istanbul is slotted for demolition to make way for yet another shopping mall. it wins when parents in Beijing are told that sending their wheezing kids to school in pollution masks decorated to look like cute cartoon characters is an acceptable price for economic progress. it wins every time we accept that we have only bad choices available to us: austerity or extraction, poisoning or poverty.

It did not seem possible that Wendy Wright had been born out of blood and internal organs like other people. In proximity to her he felt himself to be a squat, oily, sweating, uneducated nurt whose stomach rattled and whose breath wheezed. Near her he became aware of physical mechanisms which kept him alive; within him machinery, pipes and valves and gas-compressors and fan belts had to chug away at a losing task, a labor ultimately doomed. Seeing her face, he discovered that his own consisted of a garish mask; noticing her body made him feel like a low-class windup toy. All her colors possessed a subtle quality, indirectly lit. Her eyes, those green and tumbled stones, looked impassively at everything; he had never seen fear in them, or aversion, or contempt. What she saw she accepted. Generally she seemed calm. But more than that she struck him as being durable, untroubled and cool, not subject to wear, or to fatigue, or to physical illness and decline. Probably she was twenty-five or -six, but he could not imagine her looking younger, and certainly she would never look older. She had too much control over herself and outside reality for that.

Few grown humans can normally survive a fall of much more than twenty-five or thirty feet, though there have been some notable exceptions—none more memorable perhaps than that of a British airman in World War II named Nicholas Alkemade. In the late winter of 1944, while on a bombing run over Germany, Flight Sergeant Alkemade, the tail gunner on a British Lancaster bomber, found himself in a literally tight spot when his plane was hit by enemy flak and quickly filled with smoke and flames. Tail gunners on Lancasters couldn’t wear parachutes because the space in which they operated was too confined, and by the time Alkemade managed to haul himself out of his turret and reach for his parachute, he found it was on fire and beyond salvation. He decided to leap from the plane anyway rather than perish horribly in flames, so he hauled open a hatch and tumbled out into the night. He was three miles above the ground and falling at 120 miles per hour. “It was very quiet,” Alkemade recalled years later, “the only sound being the drumming of aircraft engines in the distance, and no sensation of falling at all. I felt suspended in space.” Rather to his surprise, he found himself to be strangely composed and at peace. He was sorry to die, of course, but accepted it philosophically, as something that happened to airmen sometimes. The experience was so surreal and dreamy that Alkemade was never certain afterward whether he lost consciousness, but he was certainly jerked back to reality when he crashed through the branches of some lofty pine trees and landed with a resounding thud in a snowbank, in a sitting position. He had somehow lost both his boots, and had a sore knee and some minor abrasions, but otherwise was quite unharmed. Alkemade’s survival adventures did not quite end there. After the war, he took a job in a chemical plant in Loughborough, in the English Midlands. While he was working with chlorine gas, his gas mask came loose, and he was instantly exposed to dangerously high levels of the gas. He lay unconscious for fifteen minutes before co-workers noticed his unconscious form and dragged him to safety. Miraculously, he survived. Some time after that, he was adjusting a pipe when it ruptured and sprayed him from head to foot with sulfuric acid. He suffered extensive burns but again survived. Shortly after he returned to work from that setback, a nine-foot-long metal pole fell on him from a height and very nearly killed him, but once again he recovered. This time, however, he decided to tempt fate no longer. He took a safer job as a furniture salesman and lived out the rest of his life without incident. He died peacefully, in bed, aged sixty-four in 1987. —

May I ask you a question? If you have to hold your breath too long, what is it that makes you desperate to breathe again?” “I’m running out of oxygen, I guess.” “That’s the interesting fact. It isn’t the absence of oxygen. It’s the presence of carbon dioxide. Kind of the same thing, but not exactly. The point is, you could suck up any kind of gas, and as long as it wasn’t carbon dioxide, your brain would be happy. You could have a chest full of nitrogen, no oxygen at all, about to kill you stone dead, and your lungs would say, hey man, we’re cool, no carbon dioxide here, no need for us to start pumping again until we see some. Which they never will, because you’ll never breathe again. Because you’ll never need to. Because you have no carbon dioxide. And so on. So those folks started sniffing nitrogen, but you have to go to the welding shop and the cylinders are too heavy to lift, so then they tried helium from the balloon store, but you needed masks and tubes, and the whole thing still looks weird, so in the end most folks won’t be satisfied with anything less than the old-fashioned bottle of pills and the glass of scotch. Exactly like it used to be. Except it can’t be anymore. Those pills were most likely either Nembutal or Seconal, and both of those substances are tightly controlled now. There’s no way to get them. Except illegally, of course, way down where no one can see you. There are sources. The holy grail. Most of the offers are scams, naturally. Powdered Nembutal from China, and so on. Dissolve in water or fruit juice. Maybe eight or nine hundred bucks for a lethal dose. Some poor desperate soul takes the cash to MoneyGram and sends it off, and then waits at home, anxious and tormented, and never sees any powdered Nembutal from China, because there never was any. The powder in the on-line photograph was talc, and the prescription bottle was for something else entirely. Which I felt was a new low, in the end. They’re preying on the last hopes of suicidal people.

Sunday 26 May King George VI and Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, carrying their gas masks, went to a special service in Westminster Abbey. Churchill also arrived, explaining that he could only stay for ten minutes. The government had, in their very English way, managed to avoid an official day of prayer, in case it smacked of desperation, but still knew that the churches around the nation could be relied on to pray pretty fervently. “The English are loath to expose their feelings,” wrote Churchill later, “but in my stall in the choir I could feel the pent up, passionate emotion, and also the fear of the congregation, not of death or wounds or material loss, but of defeat and the final ruin of Britain.

stoned junkies in a crack house. One said to his crew of two men, “Ten minutes, OK? We waste men, not time.” There was tension inside the van as the three men put on Kevlar vests and their Windbreakers, gas masks, and SFPD caps. They screwed the suppressors onto their M-16 automatic rifles with thirty-round magazines. When he was ready, One stepped out of the van and shot out the camera over Wicker House’s back door. The suppressor muffled the sound of the bullet. Two and Three exited the van, went to the steel-reinforced rear door, and set small, directed explosive charges on the lock and the hinges. They stood back as Two remotely detonated the charges. The soft explosions were virtually unnoticeable in the area, which was largely deserted at night. One and Two lifted the door away from the frame. Three entered the short hallway that led to the lab and started firing with his suppressed automatic rifle. Glass shattered. Blood sprayed. Once the men in the lab were down, the three men in the Windbreakers rushed the locked door to the second floor. When the lock had been shot

There was a lot of snow this winter in what remained of Toronto, fourth largest city in what remained of the North American Alliance, this ravaged continental command in what remained of the world. The trains were dead again. For long hours, Marco and his mother had been walking down the streets, heading home from the gas mask distribution center. The snow assaulted them like a second invasion, piling up at their sides, swirling around their legs, beating their faces, whipping their coats, coating their eyelashes and eyebrows, and numbing their fingers and bones and souls. It was the heart of winter. The coldest, bleakest day of the year. The coldest, bleakest century of mankind.

boots right off his feet. There were stories of men sucked down into the muck never to be seen again. Victor didn’t know if the stories were true, but he did think it possible. The mud was everywhere. In their hair under their helmets, flavoring their food, between their toes in their boots, layering their canteens, permeating their very souls. They couldn’t get away from the mud. They slept in it, fought in it, lived in it. Died in it. Sometimes after a hard downpour a new body part appeared out of the mud. Victor told himself it didn’t matter. Whoever he was, the man was dead, gone from his body to meet his Maker. What was left was just bone, sinew, and skin. And if Victor was ordered over the top and got hit by enemy fire to end up one of those bodies sunk down in the mud, what difference would it make if the soldiers lucky enough to still be breathing used his hand sticking out of the side of the trench to hold something up out of the mud. That’s how they were using Oscar’s. Nobody really knew the dead man’s name or even his nationality, but it only seemed right to name him, to make him part of their company when his hand emerged from the side of the trench. That’s how war was. A man had to survive as best he could. He couldn’t worry about what he’d left back home. He couldn’t worry about how long he was going to live. A man just had to follow orders and give all he had to win the war and save democracy. War wasn’t a thing like Victor had expected or maybe anything like anybody back in the States had expected. Back there, they’d taught them to march. Wasn’t much use for marching in the trenches. It was just hunkering down and hoping a sharpshooter didn’t spot your helmet if you forgot and lifted your head a few inches too high. Or that your gas mask would work when the Germans launched their mustard gas barrages. Or that you wouldn’t get the order to go over the top. Up

Together, they gave birth to a generation of guys in their late teens and early 20s who owned little “kits” complete with body armor, gas masks, and clubs, who regularly took them out to go fight each other. Imagine that for a moment! Imagine your personal body armor and helmet sitting in your closest, where you see them every time you get dressed, and imagine fondly remembering how brave you felt the last time you put on that armor to literally “fight evil.” Imagine, almost without noticing, you find yourself thinking up new excuses to put it on again and get those good feelings back. I will go out on a limb and say that leads to an unstable civilization.

Ojiro: My classmate went the other direction! I'm worried for him! Kendo: Oh Shinsou-kun? Don't worry, I gave him my gas mask! Ojiro: *thinking* Well how the hell am I not supposed to worry now?

Having come this far, exposed and candid, perhaps I can find sanctuary behind one incontestable truth pervading operating rooms across the country – the reality of everyday miracles. From time to time the inexplicable and the impossible happen. Behind a paper mask and under artificial lights I get to perform surgery on an unconscious body, the physical part of what we think of as a pet. Essentially I’m working construction. I’m the guy splicing wires, welding pipes, shoring up support beams, and generally renovating the house. All the other stuff, the important stuff, I cannot influence. These are the intangibles, the memories, the history, the bonds, the things that make a difference between a house and a home, the things that make the difference between a body covered in scales or feathers or fur and our pet. It is this everything else that eludes me. This everything else is the spirit of the animal. Under anesthesia, it might move out for a while, but when the surgery is done and the gas turned off, it comes back. In our worst-case scenario, regardless of whether it returns or not, it doesn’t cease to exist. Anesthesia is just a training run for the soul.

The door of her dressing-room opened and a face covered with a gas mask peered round it. Robin turned round and scowled. She did not associate much with the foot soldiers of the cast. But he eased in, carrying a splendid bunch of red roses. “To match your beauty,” he said, his voice muffled behind the mask. Robin suddenly beamed. “You are a love. What beautiful flowers!” “I see you’ve a vase over there. I’ll just pop them in for you.” “You haven’t told me your name,” said Robin.

Wealth is where history shows up in your wallet, where your financial freedom is determined by compounding interest on decisions made long before you were born. That is why the Black-white wealth gap is growing despite gains in Black education and earnings, and why the typical Black household owns only $17,600 in assets. Still, having little to no intergenerational wealth and facing massive systemic barriers, descendants of a stolen people have given America the touch-tone telephone, the carbon filament in the lightbulb, the gas mask, the modern traffic light, blood banks, the gas furnace, open-heart surgery, and the mathematics to enable the moon landing. Just imagine the possibilities if—in addition to rebuilding the pathways for all aspirants to the American Dream—we gave millions more Black Americans the life-changing freedom that a modest amount of wealth affords. A 2020 Citigroup report calculated that “if racial gaps for Blacks had been closed 20 years ago, U.S. GDP could have benefitted by an estimated $16 trillion.

digital detox is ‘not the solution, for the same reason that wearing a gas mask for two days a week outside isn’t the answer to pollution.

Sydney’s Lakemba Mosque held a conference for all its international leaders and called it ‘Take the Nation, Shake the World’, there’d be more specially trained police doing overtime than in a month of Sundays. The city would be up in arms and old people would be digging out their gas-masks. When clean-shaven white men in suits do it, it’s a cause for celebration, traffic jams in suburbia and overpriced t-shirts.

The biggest danger during the Phoney War was not bombs but the un- intended consequences of the blackout, particularly during the long win- ter nights, when it became dark well before the time that many people had begun to return home from work. Streetlights were extinguished and cars were only allowed to use their sidelights, a recipe for motor accidents. Even though there were many fewer cars being driven, the number of road deaths increased by about a third from a year earlier, to four thousand. December 1940 was particularly dangerous in London, where pedestrian deaths in- creased eightfold compared with earlier years. There were more and more children back in London, even though many schools remained closed; by late spring 1940, virtually all of those who had evacuated in September had returned. People who still brought their gas masks with them to work could become objects of scorn and ridicule when spotted on the streets by bored, less than well-behaved children (Price 2000, 17; Ziegler 1995, 56–68, 102).

Mom will never let me skate again,” he said dejectedly, slumping into the seat. “Sure she will.” Pete hit a button that locked them onto a cable track and then typed in their parents’ address at the Eris Escape Tower, floor 247. “Do you know how long it took me to convince her to let me come to the Skypark the first time?” Marcus asked as they started to glide down the cables. “She wanted me to wear a gas mask, even though the park’s enclosed in glass, and then she finally agreed only if I wore zinc sunscreen and an insane amount of padding.

said, “I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.

Mr. Geronimo was a hoarder of fuel, gas masks, flashlights, blankets, medical supplies, canned food, water in lightweight packets; a man who expected emergencies, who counted on the fabric of society to tear and disintegrate, who know that superglue could be used to hold cuts together, who did not trust human nature to build solidly or well. A man who expected the worst.

It said, “Trump has given us marching orders” and to “keep your guns hidden.” It urged people to “bring your trauma kits and gas masks,” to “link up early in the day in 6- to 12-man teams.” It indicated there would be “time to arm up.

Knowing that masks donned in time could protect against gas, they began loading shells with sneezing powder, which seeped through the masks’ filters.

What had actually been in Valera’s haversack: not a woman’s vulva but grenades, a gas mask, a gun that constantly jammed.

Birds of the Western Front Your mess-tin cover's lost. Kestrels hover above the shelling. They don't turn a feather when hunting-ground explodes in yellow earth, flickering star-shells and flares from the Revelation of St John. You look away from artillery lobbing roar and suck and snap against one corner of a thicket to the partridge of the war zone making its nest in shattered clods. History floods into subsoil to be blown apart. You cling to the hard dry stars of observation. How you survive. They were all at it: Orchids of the Crimea nature notes from the trench leaving everything unsaid - hell's cauldron with souls pushed in, demons stoking flames beneath - for the pink-flecked wings of a chaffinch flashed like mediaeval glass. You replace gangrene and gas mask with a dream of alchemy: language of the birds translating human earth to abstract and divine. While machine-gun tracery gutted that stricken wood you watched the chaffinch flutter to and fro through splintered branches, breaking buds and never a green bough left. Hundreds lay in there wounded. If any, you say, spotted one bird they may have wondered why a thing with wings would stay in such a place. She must have, sure, had chicks she was too terrified to feed, too loyal to desert. Like roots clutching at air you stick to the lark singing fit to burst at dawn sounding insincere above the burning bush: plough-land latticed like folds of brain with shell-ravines where nothing stirs but black rats, jittery sentries and the lice sliding across your faces every night. Where every elixir's gone wrong you hold to what you know. A little nature study. A solitary magpie blue and white spearing a strand of willow. One for sorrow. One for Babylon, Ninevah and Northern France, for mice and desolation, the burgeoning barn-owl population and never a green bough left.

The night was vibrating with new potential, the beautiful after-haze of adrenaline and bad ideas fully embraced. Ugly thoughts crept in, forcing me to write off a growing list of concerning data: My old dealer gone mad and roaming the sewers; Egbert’s hand—notably short on its middle and ring fingers—reaching out to me with three tiny pill baggies; gas-masked kids dodging conscious thought like a plague; a trafficked tranny more concerned with evading cops than finding love.

Walter was among the American expeditionary forces gassed with high explosive projectiles northwest of Toul, on April 3, 1918, in the course of intense shelling that lasted through the night. How much damage he sustained is hard to say. By 1918, after more than three years of chemical warfare, troops were equipped with gas masks with charcoal filters, and there were relatively few casualties. In some accounts, Walter attributed the loss of his lower front teeth to the gassing, which also altered his voice, giving it a wizened, reedy quality that he would exploit so well for comic effect and adapt when he had to play characters older than himself. On This Is Your Life, when Ralph Lindsey mentioned they took “a little shot of mustard gas,” Walter cut him off: “We’re not going to talk about that.” The two men fought together in four major campaigns in 1918: Aisne (May 27–June 16), Champagne-Marne line (July 15–18), Saint-Mihiel (September 12–15), and Meuse-Argonne (September 26–November 11). At Aisne, the Germans bombarded the Allied line with four thousand artillery pieces, and seemed to be winning until the American expeditionary forces arrived and counterattacked.

Carlton Church - Natural Disaster Survival Kit Floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, super typhoons and fires. These types of news appear more frequently within this year than the previous ones. Old people nowadays even complain of the changing world, followed by endless accounts of peaceful living during their time. Are these all effects of global warming? Is our Mother Earth now starting to get angry of what we, humans, have done to its resources? Perhaps. We can never predict when a disaster would strike our home. And since you are still reading this, it is safe to assume that you are still able breathe and live your life. The best thing we can do right now is prepare. There is no use panicking only when the warning arrives. It is better to give gear up now and perhaps survive a few more years. Preparation should not be too extravagant. And it doesn’t have to be a suitcase filled with gas masks and whatnot. Remember that on the face of disaster, having a large baggage would be more of a burden that survival assistance. Pack light. You’ll only need a few of the following things: 1. Gears, extra batteries and supplies. Multi-purpose tool/knife, moist towelettes, dust masks, waterproof matches, needle and thread, compass, area maps, extra blankets and sleeping bags should all should be part of your emergency supply kit. It is also important to bring extra charge for your devices. There are back-up universal batteries available for most cell phones that can offer an extra charge. 2. Important paperwork and insurance documents. When tsunami hit Japan last 2011, all documents were washed up resulting to chaos and strenuous recovery operations. Until now, many citizens linger in the streets of Tokyo in the hopes that most technologically advanced city in the world can reproduce certificates, diplomas and other legal and important written document stolen by water. This is why copies of personal documents like a medication list, proof of address, deed/lease to home, and insurance papers, extra cash, family photos and emergency contact information should be included in your survival kits. 3. First Aid Kit Store your first aid supplies in a tool box or fishing tackle box so they will be easy to carry and protected from water. Inspect your kit regularly and keep it freshly stocked and do not use cheap and fraudulent ones. It is also helpful to note important medical information and most prescriptions that can be tucked into your kit. Medical gauges, bandages, Hydrogen peroxide to wash and disinfect wounds, individually wrapped alcohol swabs and other dressing paraphernalia should also be useful. Read more at: carltonchurch.org

Even asleep, the little greyhound trailed after her madame, through a weave of green stars and gas lamps, along the boulevards of Paris. It was a conjured city that no native would recognize—Emma Bovary’s head on the pillow, its architect. Her Paris was assembled from a guidebook with an out-of-date map, and from the novels of Balzac and Sand, and from her vividly disordered recollections of the viscount’s ball at La Vaubyessard, with its odor of dying flowers, burning flambeaux, and truffles. (Many neighborhoods within the city’s quivering boundaries, curiously enough, smelled identical to the viscount’s dining room.) A rose and gold glow obscured the storefront windows, and cathedral bells tolled continuously as they strolled past the same four landmarks: a tremulous bridge over the roaring Seine, a vanilla-white dress shop, the vague façade of the opera house—overlaid in more gold light—and the crude stencil of a theater. All night they walked like that, companions in Emma’s phantasmal labyrinth, suspended by her hopeful mists, and each dawn the dog would wake to the second Madame Bovary, the lightly snoring woman on the mattress, her eyes still hidden beneath a peacock sleep mask. Lumped in the coverlet, Charles’s blocky legs tangled around her in an apprehensive pretzel, a doomed attempt to hold her in their marriage bed.

predicted, the lid opened. As predicted, a monster sat up in the coffin. It wasn’t a vampire or mummy. It was some bizarre, bloody mannequin with a gas mask on. There were many gashes on its bare chest, glistening with stage blood. “Hee hee,” went the prop. Tom kept his Sig on it, then slowly walked past. It was creepier than the zombie in the breakfront, and the body bag on a conveyor track, but Tom was

The orange light looks like a gasoline fire. It comes in through people's rear windows, bounces off their rearview mirrors, projects a fiery mask across their eyes, reaches into their subconscious, and unearths terrible fears of being pinned, fully conscious, under a detonating gas tank, makes them want to pull over and let the Deliverator overtake them in his black chariot of pepperoni fire.

On the floor by each child’s desk was the obligatory gas mask. Children now carried them everywhere.

By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, crowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to be barely remarked upon. Meanwhile, in the literally gilded towers above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 per cent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepeneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept coktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere, down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Albie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat.

feet, wearing a black rubber gas mask that obscured his face. His chest was bare, covered in dried blood. All he wore was stained white underwear, and combat boots, their laces untied.

I felt like I was participating in a holy march,” he later said. “It was something so moving, so precious, so spiritual.” Then he saw the troopers putting on gas masks and coming toward the column of peaceful marchers, beginning to beat the marchers and releasing tear gas. “I thought I was going to die,” said Lewis, who was beaten so badly that he still bears the scars. “But we didn’t fight back. We didn’t strike back. We didn’t hate. We had been taught to love. The way of love is much more powerful, much more creative. And somehow I came to realize that there was a spark of the Divine in every human being.

up, going to the living room window, looking through the blinds to Earl’s place. At any moment, I expected to see a fleet of Ladas with Russian mobsters pull into the driveway, guns a-blazin’. Or maybe the cops, driving up on the lawn, pouring out of their cars in riot gear, guns drawn, surrounding the house. Tear gas is lobbed in. Men in gas masks break down the door, and moments later, Earl is dragged out by an officer on either side of him, thrown facedown onto the driveway, his hands cuffed together behind his back. Men in spacesuits start hauling out hundreds of plants and packing them into the back of a specially sealed van. But nothing like that happened. The housecoat

... the last year had seen women and children carrying [gas] masks about as they carried a handbag or a skipping rope.

Candles and waterproof matches.” “Check.” “Weather radio, flashlight, batteries…” “Check, check, check…” “Hurricane-tracking chart, potable water, freeze-dried food, can opener, organic toilet paper, sensible clothes, upbeat reading material, baseball gloves, compass, whistle, signal mirror, first-aid kit, snake-bite kit, mess kit, malaria tablets, smelling salts, flints, splints, solar survival blanket, edible-wild-plant field almanac, trenching tool, semaphores, gas masks, Geiger counter, executive defibrillator, railroad flares, lemons in case of scurvy, Austrian gold coins in case paper money becomes scoffed at, laminated sixteen-language universal hostage-negotiation ‘Kwik-Guide’ (Miami-Dade edition), extra film, extra ammunition, firecrackers, handcuffs, Taser, pepper spray, throwing stars, Flipper lunch box, Eden Roc ashtray, Cypress Gardens felt pennant, alligator snow globe, miniature wooden crate of orange gumballs, acrylic seashell thermometer and pen holder, can of Florida sunshine…” “Check, check, check…. What about my inflatable woman?

and gas masks, home-made toys and cut-down clothes.

Trevor climbed once again to the land of the living, naked except for an antique gas mask strapped to his face. As he peered through glass eyes like a mutant fly and breathed through the alien snoot, a single thought coiled through the booby-trapped labyrinth of his brain: I need to be alone. I need to be alone. I need to be alone.

He doesn’t know where he is or, for that matter, who he is. A clear mask is lowered to his mouth. The voice—a woman’s—urges him, “Take a long, deep breath, and keep breathing in.” The gas he inhales is warm, concentrated oxygen. It flows down his windpipe and hits his lungs with a welcome burst of heat. Though her mouth is covered, the woman leaning over him is smiling at him with her eyes. “Better?” she asks. He nods. Her face grows sharper. And her voice . . . Something familiar.

By posing climate change as a battle between capitalism and the planet, I am not saying anything that we don’t already know. The battle is already under way, but right now capitalism is winning hands down. It wins every time the need for economic growth is used as the excuse for putting off climate action yet again, or for breaking emission reduction commitments already made. It wins when Greeks are told that their only path out of economic crisis is to open up their beautiful seas to high-risk oil and gas drilling. It wins when Canadians are told our only hope of not ending up like Greece is to allow our boreal forests to be flayed so we can access the semisolid bitumen from the Alberta tar sands. It wins when a park in Istanbul is slotted for demolition to make way for yet another shopping mall. It wins when parents in Beijing are told that sending their wheezing kids to school in pollution masks decorated to look like cute cartoon characters is an acceptable price for economic progress. It wins every time we accept that we have only bad choices available to us: austerity or extraction, poisoning or poverty.

A shell splinter cut Rags’s left forepaw. Another caromed off his gas mask, mangling his right ear. A needle-like sliver was imbedded under his right eye. The terrier was dazed for a minute, Then he struggled to his feet. Donovan lay where he had fallen. His gas mask had been shot away; arms and legs were cat by shrapnel. Blood from a gash in his forehead was blinding him. Over all hung the burning tang of gas—thinned somewhat by a northwest breeze, but still strong enough to sear the throats of sergeant and terrier. Between wheezes and coughs Rags pawed the now useless mask from his head. He licked first the sergeant’s outflung hand, then his face. Donovan roused himself. He lengthened the wire that tied the message to the dog’s collar, so Rags could carry the paper in his mouth. It would be lost if the little terrier succumbed before delivering it. The Sergeant started the dog toward the guns. As near-by bursts intensified the gas, Donovan staggered to his feet and urged the dog to a run. The terrier, favoring his wounded paw as much as he could, moved at a limping trot. Donovan, stumbling along behind, saw the concussion of a nearby shell-blast turn the little terrier on his back.

The cluster was oriented so that it was pointing toward the sun; that way, boiloff of the cryogenic propellants inside the tanks was reduced. Shadows of struts and attitude thrusters lay long against the sunlit white-and-silver bellies of the fuel tanks. The booster’s underside was illuminated only by the soft blue and green of Earthlight. She could see the great flaps of the cluster’s solar panels, folded up against the sides of the MS-IVB stage like wings; the panels would be unfurled when Ares was safely launched on its trajectory to Mars. There was the bold red UNITED STATES stenciled against the side of the MS-II, and the finer lettering along the long thin protective flaps masking the solar panels, and the NASA logo; and she could make out the support struts and attachment pins which held the External Tanks in place against the flanks of the MS-II, and the gold-gleaming mouths of the MS-II’s four J-2S engines, upgrades of the engines which had pushed Apollo to the Moon. To assemble this much mass in Earth orbit had taken all of nine Saturn VB flights over the last five years—half of them manned. The booster stages and their tanks had been flown up and assembled more or less empty, and then pumped full of gas from tanker modules. The cluster was an exercise in enhanced Apollo-Saturn technology, of course, and the essence of its design went all the way back to the 1960s. But NASA had had to develop a raft of new techniques to achieve it: the assembly in orbit of heavy components, the long-term storage of supercold fuels, in-orbit fueling.

This evening, though, the girls found it quiet. In the corner a foreign couple was taking pictures of their children wearing gas masks,

As usual, when I slip the strap of the gas-mask container over my small daughter’s shoulder, I experience a horrible sinking sensation and utter a fervent prayer that this precaution, insisted upon by the Government, may be unnecessary. My own gas mask does not trouble me in the very least and I can look it in the face without a tremor; it is only Betty’s small but hideous protection which makes me feel sick.

the proportion of people wearing quasi-military body armor with gas masks and goggles has shot up. Hey, look! There’s that guy with a flag pitchfork, again.

WE WERE HAVING a grand-scale Civil Defence exercise in Chelsea. It was June 19th, 1939. We all thought the idea very silly – we’d had one scare the previous year – and now it all seemed childish. We’d filled sand-bags, dug trenches, fitted thousands of gas-masks, only to throw them all away in an excess of relief when Chamberlain returned from Godesburg with a respite from Hitler. The scare of war had largely died away because the public had decided that it should die away. There would be no war – and the forlorn abandoned gas-masks on rubbish heaps, and the bursting sand-bags seeping over pavements and streets, were witnesses to the public’s decision.

One deep reality" also implies the idea of the universe as a simple two-decker affair made up of "appearances" and one "underlying reality," like a mask with a face behind it. Modern research, however, indicates an indefinite series of appearances on different levels of instrumental magnification and finds no one "substance" or "thing" or "deep reality" that underlies all the different appearances reported by different classes of instruments. E.g., traditional philosophy and common sense assume that the hero and the villain have different "essences," as in melodrama (the villain may wear the mask of virtue, but we know he "is really" a villain); but modern science pictures things in flux, and flux in things, so solid becomes gas and gas becomes solid again, just as hero and villain become blurred and ambiguous in modern literature or Shakespeare.

Traditionally, Guild Navigators masked their appearance, keeping themselves hidden in thick clouds of spice gas. It was generally believed that the process of becoming a Navigator transformed a person into something other than human, something more evolved. The Guild said nothing to confirm or deny the speculations.

Charlotte, this is Royal.” He pointed to the guy with the crown half mask. “Knight.” The guy beside him with the gas mask. “Hero.” Demon skeleton guy with the rune on his forehead. “And Poet.” The blinded skeleton with the happy voice. “Guys, this is Charlotte.

One day, as we formed for breakfast, the drill sergeant checked our faces to see if we had what he called “a good Army shave.” We didn’t, and he sent us back until we had shaved so close we had razor nicks all over our faces. For the first drill, we assembled in a field of tents. We were told to put on gas masks and go into one of the tents, where a metal trash can was pumping out tear gas. We were ordered to remove our masks and give our name, rank, and serial number. As soon as you took off your mask, the razor cuts started to burn, like someone had thrown acid on your face. If you were lucky, you got your name and rank right. But everyone lost control and began to cough violently before spitting out our serial numbers.

In spring, when his allergy to pollen became unbearable, he would cover his face with a gas mask (the British government had distributed them throughout the population at the start of the war), sowing panic among those who saw him pass and imagined an attack was imminent.

Umm five, no six, flashlights. Four sleeping bags. Four mylar blankets. Forty N95 masks. Two hundred surgical gloves. Two binoculars. Four butane torch lighters. Six packs of waterproof matches. Two flints. Six road flares. Two hatchets. Five permanent markers. Two gas masks. Two multitools. Six fishhooks with line. Two rolls of duct tape. Two first-aid kits. Two envelopes of cash.” “Should be ten thousand dollars