Good Pm Quotes

There is no such thing as a good call at 7 AM. It's been my experience that all calls between the hours of 11 PM and 9 AM are disaster calls.

Ladies and gentlemen of the class of '97: Wear sunscreen. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now. Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine. Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 pm on some idle Tuesday. Do one thing everyday that scares you. Sing. Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours. Floss. Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself. Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how. Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements. Stretch. Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't. Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You'll miss them when they're gone. Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll divorce at 40, maybe you'll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's. Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own. Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room. Read the directions, even if you don't follow them. Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly. Get to know your parents. You never know when they'll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They're your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future. Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young. Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel. Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders. Respect your elders. Don't expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one might run out. Don't mess too much with your hair or by the time you're 40 it will look 85. Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth. But trust me on the sunscreen.

From: EONeill22@hotmail.com Sent: Saturday, June 8, 2013 1:18 PM To: GDL824@yahoo.com Subject: what happy looks like Sunrises over the harbor. Ice cream on a hot day. The sound of the waves down the street. The way my dog curls up next to me on the couch. Evening strolls. Great movies. Thunderstorms. A good cheeseburger. Fridays. Saturdays. Wednesdays, even. Sticking your toes in the water. Pajama pants. Flip-flops. Swimming. Poetry. The absence of smiley faces in an e-mail. What does it look like to you?

Tess realized one of the great modern dating sadnesses: everyone is so used to the comforting glow of the computer screen that no one can go so far as to say "good morning" in public without being liquored up.

Yes, Marcos is gay. Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10pm, a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains. Marcos is all the exploited, marginalised, oppressed minorities resisting and saying `Enough'. He is every minority who is now beginning to speak and every majority that must shut up and listen. He is every untolerated group searching for a way to speak. Everything that makes power and the good consciences of those in power uncomfortable -- this is Marcos.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth; oh nevermind; you will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they have faded. But trust me, in 20 years you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked….You’re not as fat as you imagine. Don’t worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday. Do one thing everyday that scares you Sing Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts, don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours. Floss Don’t waste your time on jealousy; sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind…the race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself. Remember the compliments you receive, forget the insults; if you succeed in doing this, tell me how. Keep your old love letters, throw away your old bank statements. Stretch Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life…the most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives, some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don’t. Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees, you’ll miss them when they’re gone. Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll have children,maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll divorce at 40, maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary…what ever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either – your choices are half chance, so are everybody else’s. Enjoy your body, use it every way you can…don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.. Dance…even if you have nowhere to do it but in your own living room. Read the directions, even if you don’t follow them. Do NOT read beauty magazines, they will only make you feel ugly. Get to know your parents, you never know when they’ll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings; they are the best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future. Understand that friends come and go,but for the precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle because the older you get, the more you need the people you knew when you were young.

December 27, 11:00 p.m. My Dear America, I’ve never written a love letter, so forgive me if I fail now. . . . The simple thing would be to say that I love you. But, in truth, it’s so much more than that. I want you, America. I need you. I’ve held back so much from you out of fear. I’m afraid that if I show you everything at once, it will overwhelm you, and you’ll run away. I’m afraid that somewhere in the back of your heart is a love for someone else that will never die. I’m afraid that I will make a mistake again, something so huge that you retreat into that silent world of yours. No scolding from a tutor, no lashing from my father, no isolation in my youth has ever hurt me so much as you separating yourself from me. I keep thinking that it’s there, waiting to come back and strike me. So I’ve held on to all my options, fearing that the moment I wipe them away, you will be standing there with your arms closed, happy to be my friend but unable to be my equal, my queen, my wife. And for you to be my wife is all I want in the world. I love you. I was afraid to admit it for a long time, but I know it now. I would never rejoice in the loss of your father, the sadness you’ve felt since he passed, or the emptiness I’ve experienced since you left. But I’m so grateful that you had to go. I’m not sure how long it would have taken for me to figure this out if I hadn’t had to start trying to imagine a life without you. I know now, with absolute certainty, that is nothing I want. I wish I was as true an artist as you so that I could find a way to tell you what you’ve become to me. America, my love, you are sunlight falling through trees. You are laughter that breaks through sadness. You are the breeze on a too-warm day. You are clarity in the midst of confusion. You are not the world, but you are everything that makes the world good. Without you, my life would still exist, but that’s all it would manage to do. You said that to get things right one of us would have to take a leap of faith. I think I’ve discovered the canyon that must be leaped, and I hope to find you waiting for me on the other side. I love you, America. Yours forever, Maxon

In early sobriety I heard that if you have an idea after ten p.m., it is probably not a good idea—and this was before e-mail.

It's 5:22pm you're in the grocery checkout line. Your three-year-old is writhing on the floor, screaming, because you have refused to buy her a Teletubby pinwheel. Your six-year-old is whining, repeatedly, in a voice that could saw through cement, "But mommy, puleeze, puleeze" because you have not bought him the latest "Lunchables," which features, as the four food groups, Cheetos, a Snickers, Cheez Whiz, and Twizzlers. Your teenager, who has not spoken a single word in the past foor days, except, "You've ruined my life," followed by "Everyone else has one," is out in the car, sulking, with the new rap-metal band Piss on the Parentals blasting through the headphones of a Discman. To distract yourself, and to avoid the glares of other shoppers who have already deemed you the worst mother in America, you leaf through People magazine. Inside, Uma thurman gushes "Motherhood is Sexy." Moving on to Good Housekeeping, Vanna White says of her child, "When I hear his cry at six-thirty in the morning, I have a smile on my face, and I'm not an early riser." Another unexpected source of earth-mother wisdom, the newly maternal Pamela Lee, also confides to People, "I just love getting up with him in the middle of the night to feed him or soothe him." Brought back to reality by stereophonic whining, you indeed feel as sexy as Rush Limbaugh in a thong.

USURY: Everybody's looking for the job in which you never have to pay anyone their pound of flesh. Self-employed nirvana. A lot of artists like to think of themselves as uncompromising; a lot of management consultants won't tell you what they do until they've sunk five pints. I don't think anybody should give themselves air just because they don't have to hand over a pound of flesh every day at 5pm, and I don't think anyone should beat themselves with broken glass because they do. If you're an artist, well, good for you. Thank your lucky stars every evening and dance in the garden with the fairies. But don't fool yourself that you occupy some kind of higher moral ground. You have to work for that. Writing a few lines, painting a pretty picture - that just won't do it.

3:12 pm Secretly, I admit, I find many of my classmates annoying. I've often thought to myself, 'Good grief, these people are five-year-olds. Why must I spend my days among them?' But have I ever said such things aloud? No. I have been nothing but generous to them, and kept these thoughts to myself. And how have they repaid me? Have they been grateful or kind? Ho NO!

Ground rules, Tanner,” he growled. Tanner paled. More good. “No alcohol. No smoking. No drugs. No looking at other girls. You can dance with my daughter. Your hands will avoid the danger zones, which are here, here and here.” Liam gestured to his chest, groin and ass. “You can kiss her. Once. At 10:59 p.m. tonight, when you’ll be standing here once again. I will be on the other side of this door, waiting for her. Am I clear?” “Yes, sir,” Tanner whispered. “I was your age once, too,” Liam said. “I’m aware of that, sir.” “I know what you think about.” “I’m sorry.” “You can think it. You can’t do it.” “Okay.” “I have many sharp tools in my garage.” “Yes, sir.” “We’re clear, then?” “Very, sir.” “Good!” Liam smiled, then grabbed the boy by the shoulder and dragged him in. “Nicole! Your date’s here.

There are a number of things a woman can tell about a man who is roughly twenty-nine years old, sitting in the cab of a pickup truck at 3:37 in the afternoon on a weekday, facing the Pacific, writing furiously on the back of pink invoice slips. Such a man may or may not be employed, but regardless, there is mystery there. If this man is with a dog, then that's good, because it means he's capable of forming relationships. But if the dog is a male dog, that's probably a bad sign, because it means the guy is likely a dog, too. A girl dog is much better, but if the guy is over thirty, any kind of dog is a bad sign regardless, because it means he's stopped trusting humans altogether. In general, if nothing else, guys my age with dogs are going to be work. Then there's stubble: stubble indicates a possible drinker, but if he's driving a van or a pickup truck, he hasn't hit bottom yet, so watch out, honey. A guy writing something on a clipboard while facing the ocean at 3:37 P.M. may be writing poetry, or he may be writing a letter begging someone for forgiveness. But if he's writing real words, not just a job estimate or something business-y, then more likely than not this guy has something emotional going on, which could mean he has a soul.

(Golden Globe acceptance speech in the style of Jane Austen's letters): "Four A.M. Having just returned from an evening at the Golden Spheres, which despite the inconveniences of heat, noise and overcrowding, was not without its pleasures. Thankfully, there were no dogs and no children. The gowns were middling. There was a good deal of shouting and behavior verging on the profligate, however, people were very free with their compliments and I made several new acquaintances. Miss Lindsay Doran, of Mirage, wherever that might be, who is largely responsible for my presence here, an enchanting companion about whom too much good cannot be said. Mr. Ang Lee, of foreign extraction, who most unexpectedly apppeared to understand me better than I undersand myself. Mr. James Schamus, a copiously erudite gentleman, and Miss Kate Winslet, beautiful in both countenance and spirit. Mr. Pat Doyle, a composer and a Scot, who displayed the kind of wild behavior one has lernt to expect from that race. Mr. Mark Canton, an energetic person with a ready smile who, as I understand it, owes me a vast deal of money. Miss Lisa Henson -- a lovely girl, and Mr. Gareth Wigan -- a lovely boy. I attempted to converse with Mr. Sydney Pollack, but his charms and wisdom are so generally pleasing that it proved impossible to get within ten feet of him. The room was full of interesting activitiy until eleven P.M. when it emptied rather suddenly. The lateness of the hour is due therefore not to the dance, but to the waiting, in a long line for horseless vehicles of unconscionable size. The modern world has clearly done nothing for transport. P.S. Managed to avoid the hoyden Emily Tomkins who has purloined my creation and added things of her own. Nefarious creature." "With gratitude and apologies to Miss Austen, thank you.

When I’m with friends now, as an adult, I don’t want to have polite adult tea and talk about our jobs. I don’t want to sit in dress pants while we talk about a New Yorker article. Not really. I want to lie on the couch, cozy in blankets, watching movies, feeling safe enough to pass out and stay the night if we want to. I want to turn English muffins into foundations for pizza bagels at ten p.m., even though they’re not as good as bagels and we know it. I want to tell each other things we can’t talk about online, or we can’t tell our coworkers, and to cry and still be lovable, even if we’re in pain sometimes. To break in front of each other, and pick up the pieces together, before making some dumb joke and telling each other we love each other and knowing we’re safe to be all of it.

Today 5:14 p.m. "Mrrrrrowl. Mrrrrrowl." "Ow! Ow, stupid cat! Ahem. You told me, 'stop calling, Isabelle,' but I'm not the one calling you. Church is calling you. Mine are merely the fingers that work the phone. "See, here's something you may not have known before you committed your recent rash acts. Our cat, Church, and your cat, Chairman Meow? They're in love. I've never seen such love before. I never knew such love could exist in the heart of a... cat. Some people say that love between two dude cats is wrong, but I think it's beautiful. Love makes Church happier than I've ever seen him. Nothing makes him happy like Chairman Meow. Not tuna. Not shredding centuries-old tapestries. Nothing. Please don't keep these cats apart. Please don't take the joy of love away from Church. "Look, this is really just a warning for your own good. If you keep Church and Chairman Meow apart, Church will start to get angry. "You wouldn't like Church when he's angry." Beep

Eric, you need to look at the whole picture," the PM said. "You look at the jobless as a huge pile of scrap and you're looking for what can be recycled. That's good. That's your job. But what you don't realise is that this pile of scrap itself serves a purpose. I need my zeros, Eric. They put fear in people; fear of crime and terrorism. They are a stark reminder to the stakeholders that what they despise today, they may end up joining tomorrow. It keeps them obedient. Remember that!

They taught me that being of service, an ally to the lonely and suffering, a big-girl helper to underdogs, was my best shot at happiness. They taught me that most of my good ideas were not helpful, and that all of my ideas after ten p.m. were especially unhelpful. They taught me to pay attention, but not so much attention to my tiny princess mind.

Johnny's entry was free as it was before 11pm, which was good news for me, because I hate spending money on things I don't actually want to do.

My delightful, my love, my life, I don’t understand anything: how can you not be with me? I’m so infinitely used to you that I now feel myself lost and empty: without you, my soul. You turn my life into something light, amazing, rainbowed—you put a glint of happiness on everything—always different: sometimes you can be smoky-pink, downy, sometimes dark, winged—and I don’t know when I love your eyes more—when they are open or shut. It’s eleven p.m. now: I’m trying with all the force of my soul to see you through space; my thoughts plead for a heavenly visa to Berlin via air . . . My sweet excitement . . . Today I can’t write about anything except my longing for you. I’m gloomy and fearful: silly thoughts are swarming—that you’ll stumble as you jump out of a carriage in the underground, or that someone will bump into you in the street . . . I don’t know how I’ll survive the week. My tenderness, my happiness, what words can I write for you? How strange that although my life’s work is moving a pen over paper, I don’t know how to tell you how I love, how I desire you. Such agitation—and such divine peace: melting clouds immersed in sunshine—mounds of happiness. And I am floating with you, in you, aflame and melting—and a whole life with you is like the movement of clouds, their airy, quiet falls, their lightness and smoothness, and the heavenly variety of outline and tint—my inexplicable love. I cannot express these cirrus-cumulus sensations. When you and I were at the cemetery last time, I felt it so piercingly and clearly: you know it all, you know what will happen after death—you know it absolutely simply and calmly—as a bird knows that, fluttering from a branch, it will fly and not fall down . . . And that’s why I am so happy with you, my lovely, my little one. And here’s more: you and I are so special; the miracles we know, no one knows, and no one loves the way we love. What are you doing now? For some reason I think you’re in the study: you’ve got up, walked to the door, you are pulling the door wings together and pausing for a moment—waiting to see if they’ll move apart again. I’m tired, I’m terribly tired, good night, my joy. Tomorrow I’ll write you about all kinds of everyday things. My love.

The average American watches more than four hours of TV each day. In a 65-year life, that person will have spent nine years glued to the tube. Why? Simple. Life sucks. Life needs an escape. Life is no good. Show me someone who spends hours online playing Mafia Wars or Farmville, and I'll show you someone who probably isn't very successful. When life sucks, escapes are sought. I don't need television because I invested my time into a real life worth living, not a fictitious escape that airs every Tuesday night at 8 p.m. Again, majority thinking yields mediocrity, and for that majority, time is an asset that is undervalued and mindlessly squandered.

asking your teenage son or daughter to go to bed and fall asleep at ten p.m. is the circadian equivalent of asking you, their parent, to go to sleep at seven or eight p.m. No matter how loud you enunciate the order, no matter how much that teenager truly wishes to obey your instruction, and no matter what amount of willed effort is applied by either of the two parties, the circadian rhythm of a teenager will not be miraculously coaxed into a change. Furthermore, asking that same teenager to wake up at seven the next morning and function with intellect, grace, and good mood is the equivalent of asking you, their parent, to do the same at four or five a.m.

It goes something like this: I am one person among 6.5 billion people on Earth at the moment. That's one person among 6,500,000,000 people. That'a lot of Wembley Stadiums full of people, and even more double-decker buses (apparently the standard British measurements for size). And we live on an Earth that is spinning at 67,000 miles an hour through space around a sun that is the centre of our solar system (and our solar system is spinning around the centre of the Milky Way at 530,000 mph). Just our solar system (which is a tiny speck within the entire universe) is very big indeed. If Earth was a peppercorn and Jupiter was a chestnut (the standard American measurements), you'd have to place them 100 metres apart to get a sense of the real distance between us. And this universe is only one of many. In fact, the chances are that there are many, many more populated Earths - just like ours - in other universes. And that's just space. Have a look at time, too. If you're in for a good run, you may spend 85 years on this Earth. Man has been around for 100,000 years, so you're going to spend just 0.00085 percent of man's history living on this Earth. And Man's stay on Earth has been very short in the context of the life of the Earth (which is 4.5 billion years old): if the Earth had been around for the equivalent of a day (with the Big Bang kicking it all off at midnight), humans didn't turn up until 11.59.58 p.m. That means we've only been around for the last two seconds. A lifetime is gone in a flash. There are relatively few people on this Earth that were here 100 years ago. Just as you'll be gone (relatively) soon. So, with just the briefest look at the spatial and temporal context of our lives, we are utterly insignificant. As the Perspective Machine lifts up so far above the woods that we forget what the word means, we see just one moving light. It is beautiful. A small, gently glowing light. It is a firefly lost somewhere in the cosmos. And a firefly - on Earth - lives for just one night. It glows beautifully, then goes out. And up there so high in our Perspective Machine we realize that our lives are really just like that of the firefly. Except the air is full of 6.5 billion fireflies. They're glowing beautifully for one night. Then they are gone. So, Fuck It, you might as well REALLY glow.

FROM BRANDON: Hi Nikki, Looking forward 2 going 2 the dance with you. Good luck finding a dress that will actually make you look beautiful! 7:39 p.m.

Let us toast to good things about bad times, to old friends and new enemies, to great tragedies and small pleasures!

Is that a good enough reason to think that China and India, Africa and the Americas, whether at pole or equator, are simply uncivilised because they are different?

If, by the virtue of charity or the funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts. You will find out that once MA’s Department of Social Services has taken a mother’s children away for any period of time, they can always take them away again, D.S.S ., like at will, empowered by nothing more than a certain signature-stamped form. I.e. once deemed Unfit— no matter why or when, or what’s transpired in the meantime— there’s nothing a mother can do.(...)That a little-mentioned paradox of Substance addiction is: that once you are sufficiently enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance in order to save your life, the enslaving Substance has become so deeply important to you that you will all but lose your mind when it is taken away from you. Or that sometime after your Substance of choice has just been taken away from you in order to save your life, as you hunker down for required A.M. and P.M. prayers , you will find yourself beginning to pray to be allowed literally to lose your mind, to be able to wrap your mind in an old newspaper or something and leave it in an alley to shift for itself, without you.(...)That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. Then that most nonaddicted adult civilians have already absorbed and accepted this fact, often rather early on.(...)That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil. That it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person. That it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds.(...)That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people.(...)That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.(...)That most Substance -addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. That the cute Boston AA term for addictive -type thinking is: Analysis-Paralysis. That 99% of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that if they stop to think about it, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences of are never good.(...)That other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid.(...)That certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.

A book won't move your eyes for you like TV or a movie does. A book won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won't do the work for you. To read a good novel well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it—everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is a collaboration, an act of participation. No wonder not everybody is up to it.

We're so lucky," I said. "Don't you think? Most people don't have that. I know, everywhere other than New York, if you have a good job and a spouse and kids and a house and a car, those are the markers of maturity and stability and completeness. And you eat your dinner at seven P.M. and go to bed at ten, and go for vigorous jogs on the weekend. If you're into that, great. But there are lots of other ways to put a life together.

The bar, though, was cool and dry—not just air-conditioner cool, but cool like they were piping in an evening from late autumn. The sun hadn’t set, but inside, the dark wood paneling managed to evoke 10 P.M. In a good bar, it is always 10 P.M.

An artist must regulate his life. Here is a time-table of my daily acts. I rise at 7.18; am inspired from 10.23 to 11.47. I lunch at 12.11 and leave the table at 12.14. A healthy ride on horse-back round my domain follows from 1.19 pm to 2.53 pm. Another bout of inspiration from 3.12 to 4.7 pm. From 5 to 6.47 pm various occupations (fencing, reflection, immobility, visits, contemplation, dexterity, natation, etc.) Dinner is served at 7.16 and finished at 7.20 pm. From 8.9 to 9.59 pm symphonic readings (out loud). I go to bed regularly at 10.37 pm. Once a week (on Tuesdays) I awake with a start at 3.14 am. My only nourishment consists of food that is white: eggs, sugar, shredded bones, the fat of dead animals, veal, salt, coco-nuts, chicken cooked in white water, mouldy fruit, rice, turnips, sausages in camphor, pastry, cheese (white varieties), cotton salad, and certain kinds of fish (without their skin). I boil my wine and drink it cold mixed with the juice of the Fuschia. I have a good appetite but never talk when eating for fear of strangling myself. I breathe carefully (a little at a time) and dance very rarely. When walking I hold my ribs and look steadily behind me. My expression is very serious; when I laugh it is unintentional, and I always apologise very politely. I sleep with only one eye closed, very profoundly. My bed is round with a hole in it for my head to go through. Every hour a servant takes my temperature and gives me another.

We arrived at Stazione Termini around 7 p.m. on a Wednesday evening. The air was thick and muggy, as if Rome had been awash in a rainstorm that had come and gone and relieved none of the dampness. With dusk scarcely an hour away, the street-lights glistened through dense halos, while the lighted storefronts seemed doused in gleaming colors of their own invention. Dampness clung to every forehead and every face. I wanted to caress his face. I couldn’t wait to get to our hotel and shower and throw myself on the bed, knowing all the while that, unless we had good air-conditioning, I’d be no better off after the shower. But I also loved the languor that sat upon the city, like a lover’s tired, unsteady arm resting on your shoulders.

How long before I die?” he answered, “You probably have three to six months of good health.” That reminded me of my time at Disney. Ask Disney World workers: “What time does the park close?” They’re supposed to answer: “The park is open until 8 p.m.” In

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But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing...and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, "I am a mechanic." At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job.

Fire, fire! The branches crackle and the night wind of late autumn blows the flame of the bonfire back and forth. The compound is dark; I am alone at the bonfire, and I can bring it still some more carpenters' shavings. The compound here is a privileged one, so privileged that it is almost as if I were out in freedom -- this is an island of paradise; this is the Marfino "sharashka" -- a scientific institute staffed with prisoners -- in its most privileged period. No one is overseeing me, calling me to a cell, chasing me away from the bonfire, and even then it is chilly in the penetrating wind. But she -- who has already been standing in the wind for hours, her arms straight down, her head drooping, weeping, then growing numb and still. And then again she begs piteously "Citizen Chief! Please forgive me! I won't do it again." The wind carries her moan to me, just as if she were moaning next to my ear. The citizen chief at the gatehouse fires up his stove and does not answer. This was the gatehouse of the camp next door to us, from which workers came into our compound to lay water pipes and to repair the old ramshackle seminary building. Across from me, beyond the artfully intertwined, many-stranded barbed-wire barricade and two steps away from the gatehouse, beneath a bright lantern, stood the punished girl, head hanging, the wind tugging at her grey work skirt, her feet growing numb from the cold, a thin scarf over her head. It had been warm during the day, when they had been digging a ditch on our territory. And another girl, slipping down into a ravine, had crawled her way to the Vladykino Highway and escaped. The guard had bungled. And Moscow city buses ran right along the highway. When they caught on, it was too late to catch her. They raised the alarm. A mean, dark major arrived and shouted that if they failed to catch the girl, the entire camp would be deprived of visits and parcels for whole month, because of her escape. And the women brigadiers went into a rage, and they were all shouting, one of them in particular, who kept viciously rolling her eyes: "Oh, I hope they catch her, the bitch! I hope they take scissors and -- clip, clip, clip -- take off all her hair in front of the line-up!" But the girl who was now standing outside the gatehouse in the cold had sighed and said instead: "At least she can have a good time out in freedom for all of us!" The jailer had overheard what she said, and now she was being punished; everyone else had been taken off to the camp, but she had been set outside there to stand "at attention" in front of the gatehouse. This had been at 6 PM, and it was now 11 PM. She tried to shift from one foot to another, but the guard stuck out his head and shouted: "Stand at attention, whore, or else it will be worse for you!" And now she was not moving, only weeping: "Forgive me, Citizen Chief! Let me into the camp, I won't do it any more!" But even in the camp no one was about to say to her: "All right, idiot! Come on it!" The reason they were keeping her out there so long was that the next day was Sunday, and she would not be needed for work. Such a straw-blond, naive, uneducated slip of a girl! She had been imprisoned for some spool of thread. What a dangerous thought you expressed there, little sister! They want to teach you a lesson for the rest of your life! Fire, fire! We fought the war -- and we looked into the bonfires to see what kind of victory it would be. The wind wafted a glowing husk from the bonfire. To that flame and to you, girl, I promise: the whole wide world will read about you.

Becoming an Early Riser Phase 1: Be home by 10 p.m. every night. Phase 2: Have all devices (TV, phone, etc.) turned off by 10 p.m. every night. Phase 3: Be in bed by 10 p.m. every night (reading a book, talking with your partner). Phase 4: Lights off by 10 p.m. every night. Phase 5: Wake up at 6 a.m. every day.

Your life right now is pretty darn good! Some people wait all day for 5pm, all week for Friday, all year for the holidays, all their lives for happiness. Don’t be one of them. Don’t wait until your life is almost over to realize how good it has been. The good life begins right now, when you stop waiting for a better one.

for five hours. When he finally got in to see Musk at 8 p.m., Dontchev took the opportunity to unload about how his gung-ho approach wasn’t valued at Boeing. When hiring or promoting, Musk made a point of prioritizing attitude over résumé skills. And his definition of a good attitude was a desire to work maniacally hard. Musk hired Dontchev on the spot.

Allison says: September 26, 2009 at 6:01 pm Bruce! You’re a genius! I hadn’t thought of the safety benefits. I’ll pass that on to Janette; I’m sure she’ll be jazzed to hear that short hair makes her a zombie-dodging ninja superstar. Good luck in the library. And what’s this about no weapons? Get yourself a solid dictionary and throw that sucker like it’s the motherfucking Olympics.

4-19-10 Monday 1:00 P.M. Today the gas was turned off – more panic reactions. I’m wondering if the darkest hour is just before the dawn and all those wonderful cliches. I don’t see anyway out of my current situation, at least any quality of life I’m willing to accept. It’s just too much to think about right now. I lost the gas stove, the heat, and the water heater. Hmm cold showers, but found an electric crock pot and frying pan, and I still have the microwave. I don’t know what I’ll do if I lose the water. My mother told me there’s a family who pitched a tent in the forest preserve. Somehow the father’s still working and keeping his two kids in school, with a little help from a local church. And it’s good to know the forest rangers have a heart and have looked the other way. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that they’ve dropped off some food and supplies. Isn’t that America.

I never leave home without my cayenne pepper. I either stash a bottle of the liquid extract in my pocket book or I stick it in the shopping cart I pull around with me all over Manhattan. When it comes to staying right side up in this world, a black woman needs at least three things. The first is a quiet spot of her own, a place away from the nonsense. The second is a stash of money, like the cash my mother kept hidden in the slit of her mattress. The last is several drops of cayenne pepper, always at the ready. Sprinkle that on your food before you eat it and it’ll kill any lurking bacteria. The powder does the trick as well, but I prefer the liquid because it hits the bloodstream quickly. Particularly when eating out, I won’t touch a morsel to my lips ‘til it’s speckled with with cayenne. That’s just one way I take care of my temple, aside from preparing my daily greens, certain other habits have carried me toward the century mark. First thing I do every morning is drink four glasses of water. People think this water business is a joke. But I’m here to tell you that it’s not. I’ve known two elderly people who died of dehydration, one of whom fell from his bed in the middle of the night and couldn’t stand up because he was so parched. Following my water, I drink 8 ounces of fresh celery blended in my Vita-mix. The juice cleanses the system and reduces inflammation. My biggest meal is my first one: oatmeal. I soak my oats overnight so that when I get up all I have to do is turn on the burner. Sometimes I enjoy them with warm almond milk, other times I add grated almonds and berries, put the mixture in my tumbler and shake it until it’s so smooth I can drink it. In any form, oats do the heart good. Throughout the day I eat sweet potatoes, which are filled with fiber, beets sprinkled with a little olive oil, and vegetables of every variety. I also still enjoy plenty of salad, though I stopped adding so many carrots – too much sugar. But I will do celery, cucumbers, seaweed grass and other greens. God’s fresh bounty doesn’t need a lot of dressing up, which is why I generally eat my salad plain. From time to time I do drizzle it with garlic oil. I love the taste. I also love lychee nuts. I put them in the freezer so that when I bite into them cold juice comes flooding out. As terrific as they are, I buy them only once in awhile. I recently bit into an especially sweet one, and then I stuck it right back in the freezer. “Not today, Suzie,” I said to myself, “full of glucose!” I try never to eat late, and certainly not after nine p.m. Our organs need a chance to rest. And before bed, of course, I have a final glass of water. I don’t mess around with my hydration.

What time is the funeral" " Two pm." "Are you going, Sergeant?" "Yes." "Can anyone go?" "Anyone can go Beula, but only good people with respectful intentions should attend don't you think? Without Tilly's tolerance and generosity, her patience and skills, our lives - mine especially - would not have been enriched. Since you are not sincere about her feelings or about her dear mother and only want to go to stickybeak - well it's just plain ghoulish isn't it?

What’s Chamberlain saying?” the president asked. “I’m afraid he’s dithering, Mr. President,” Hull replied. “Downing Street is in a panic. Churchill is pushing the PM to declare war, but Chamberlain won’t do it.” “Good heaven—the man has no spine,” Roosevelt snapped. “Is he just going to let the Nazis take over all of Europe? Is that his plan? What about the French? Will they declare war?” “Not without the British,” Welles said. “Paris doesn’t want to be out there all by themselves.

When the White House got news of the disaster, POTUS coordinated a relief effort pretty much immediately. According to the ticktock, the minute-by-minute outline of an event that the White House comms team would send out afterward, POTUS heard about the quake at 5:52 PM in the Oval Office on January 12, and by 9:00 PM he was in the Situation Room for an emergency meeting to figure out the relief effort, which would include the deployment of thousands of troops and $100 million in aid. He asked a small group of people to go to Haiti to coordinate it immediately:

For the first time in months almost no wind blasted the summit, but the snow on the upper mountain was thigh deep, making for slow, exhausting progress. Kropp bulled his way relentlessly upward through the drifts, however, and by two o’clock Thursday afternoon he’d reached 28,700 feet, just below the South Summit. But even though the top was no more than sixty minutes above, he decided to turn around, believing that he would be too tired to descend safely if he climbed any higher. “To turn around that close to the summit …,” Hall mused with a shake of his head on May 6 as Kropp plodded past Camp Two on his way down the mountain. “That showed incredibly good judgment on young Göran’s part. I’m impressed—considerably more impressed, actually, than if he’d continued climbing and made the top.” Over the previous month, Rob had lectured us repeatedly about the importance of having a predetermined turnaround time on our summit day—in our case it would probably be 1:00 P.M., or 2:00 at the very latest—and abiding by it no matter how close we were to the top. “With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill,” Hall observed. “The trick is to get back down alive.

Jobs also attacked America’s education system, saying that it was hopelessly antiquated and crippled by union work rules. Until the teachers’unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform. Teachers should be treated as professionals, he said, not as industrial assembly- line workers. Principals should be able to hire and fire them based on how good they were. Schools should be staying open until at least 6 p.m. and be in session eleven months of the year. It was absurd, he added, that American classrooms were still based on teachers standing at a board and using textbooks. All books, learning materials, and assessments should be digital and interactive, tailored to each student and providing feedback in real time.

Life, in short, just wants to be. But—and here’s an interesting point—for the most part it doesn’t want to be much. This is perhaps a little odd because life has had plenty of time to develop ambitions. If you imagine the 4.5 billion odd years of Earth’s history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow. Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flashbulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It’s a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long. Perhaps an even more effective way of grasping our extreme recentness as a part of this 4.5-billion-year-old picture is to stretch your arms to their fullest extent and imagine that width as the entire history of the Earth. On this scale, according to John McPhee in Basin and Range, the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other is Precambrian. All of complex life is in one hand, “and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history.” Fortunately, that moment hasn’t happened, but the chances are good that it will. I don’t wish to interject a note of gloom just at this point, but the fact is that there is one other extremely pertinent quality about life on Earth: it goes extinct. Quite regularly. For all the trouble they take to assemble and preserve themselves, species crumple and die remarkably routinely. And the more complex they get, the more quickly they appear to go extinct. Which is perhaps one reason why so much of life isn’t terribly ambitious.

11 pm: Heart’s pounding, hands shaking. Have these knots in my stomach. But drinking isn’t an option. Maa is sleeping with me. Baba in Lalitaji’s room. And she on the sofa. Want to step into the toilet, take one swig, and then go directly to sleep. How the hell will Maa know? I mean she’s sleeping like a log. No, no, shouldn’t. What if she wakes up? She’s a light sleeper, after all. 11.30 pm: No wine. Or vodka. Terrible, terrible night. When will they go back to Kolkata and let me be? 11.32 pm: Chhi . . .Chhi . . . How selfish am I? My parents, one with a heart condition, spent thousands on flight tickets and landed in Chennai. Why? Because they wanted to spend time with their widowed daughter. And what does the daughter want? To sneak into the toilet and take one good swig of wine. Shame on her! Okay, now I’m being over-dramatic.

A thug. In peacetime Fitch would be hanging around a pool table giving the cops trouble. He was perfect for war. Tibbets had chosen his men well - most of them, anyway. Moving back past Haddock January stopped to stare at the group of men in the navigation cabin. They joked, drank coffee. They were all a bit like Fitch: young toughs, capable and thoughtless. They're having a good time, an adventure. That was January's dominant impression of his companions in the 509th; despite all the bitching and the occasional moments of overmastering fear, they were having a good time. His mind spun forward and he saw what these young men would grow up to be like as clearly as if they stood before him in businessmen's suits, prosperous and balding. They would be tough and capable and thoughtless, and as the years passed and the great war receded in time they would look back on it with ever-increasing nostalgia, for they would be the survivors and not the dead. Every year of this war would feel like ten in their memories, so that the war would always remain the central experience of their lives - a time when history lay palpable in their hands, when each of their daily acts affected it, when moral issues were simple, and others told them what to do - so that as more years passed and the survivors aged, bodies falling apart, lives in one rut or another, they would unconsciously push harder and harder to thrust the world into war again, thinking somewhere inside themselves that if they could only return to world war then they would magically be again as they were in the last one - young, and free, and happy. And by that time they would hold the positions of power, they would be capable of doing it.

becomes more powerful. It believes alcohol is necessary for survival (again, more than food, more than sex), and it’s on a mission to get it. If you’ve ever woken up hungover and resolved to never drink again, and at five p.m. found yourself standing in line with a bottle of red in your hand, this is the flip. Your top-down controls—which made promises to not drink, which are horrified by your perceived weakness, which know that alcohol does you no favors, which want a social life and a future and a sober night with your kids—are weakened, and the part of you that thinks in terms of the next fifteen seconds, which is concerned only with your survival, is running the show and telling you to fuck it, the wine is what matters. This is the cycle of addiction. It doesn’t matter how much we want to quit or hate that we haven’t; we feel compelled to ingest a substance or engage in a behavior we think will provide relief, or make us feel good, and whatever relief or goodness we get in the

I feel so far away from them, on the top of this hill. It seems as though I belong to another species. They come out of their offices after their day of work, they look at the houses and the squares with satisfaction, they think it is their city, a good, solid, bourgeois city. They aren’t afraid, they feel at home. All they have ever seen is trained water running from taps, light which fills bulbs when you turn on the switch, half-breed, bastard trees held up with crutches. They have proof, a hundred times a day, that everything happens mechanically, that the world obeys fixed, unchangeable laws. In a vacuum all bodies fall at the same rate of speed, the public park is closed at 4 p.m. in winter, at 6 p.m. in summer, lead melts at 335 degrees centigrade, the last streetcar leaves the Hotel de Ville at 11.05 p.m. They are peaceful, a little morose, they think about Tomorrow, that is to say, simply, a new today; cities have only one day at their disposal and every morning it comes back exactly the same. They scarcely doll it up a bit on Sundays. Idiots. It is repugnant to me to think that I am going to see their thick, self-satisfied faces. They make laws, they write popular novels, they get married, they are fools enough to have children. And all this time, great, vague nature has slipped into their city, it has infiltrated everywhere, in their house, in their office, in themselves. It doesn’t move, it stays quietly and they are full of it inside, they breathe it, and they don’t see it, they imagine it to be outside, twenty miles from the city. I see it, I see this nature . . . I know that its obedience is idleness, I know it has no laws: what they take for constancy is only habit and it can change tomorrow. What if something were to happen? What if something suddenly started throbbing? Then they would notice it was there and they’d think their hearts were going to burst. Then what good would their dykes, bulwarks, power houses, furnaces and pile drivers be to them? It can happen any time, perhaps right now: the omens are present.

To summarize my trading strategy for VWAP False Breakouts: Once I’ve made my watchlist for the day, I monitor the price action around VWAP at the Open and during the morning session for the Stocks in Play. A good Stock in Play shows respect toward VWAP. If the Stock in Play sells off below the VWAP but bounces back and breaks out above the VWAP, it means the buyers are gaining control and short sellers perhaps had to cover. However, if it loses the VWAP again in the Late-Morning (from 10:30 a.m. to 12 p.m.), it means that this time the buyers were mostly weak or exhausted. This provides a short opportunity with a stop loss above VWAP. The profit target can be the by then low of the day, or any other important technical level. I try to go short when a Stock in Play has lost the VWAP. Sometimes I go short before the price loses the VWAP, to get a good entry while it is ticking down toward VWAP in the anticipation of a VWAP loss. However, be very careful, for the job of a trader is identification and not anticipation. Take small size and add more shares on the way down if you have truly identified a good trading setup.

Here are my 12 Rules for Living: I go to bed and get up at the same time seven days per week (8 p.m. and 4 a.m., respectively). I stick to my diet, avoid caffeine after 1 p.m., and avoid alcohol within three hours of bedtime. I write for at least sixty minutes first thing every morning. I do not check email before noon and I do not talk on the phone unless it is a scheduled interview or conference call. I act polite and courteous, and I do not swear. I create a to-do list at the start & end of every workday and update my daily gratitude & achievement journal. I do not engage in confrontations with anyone, in-person or online. This is a waste of time and energy. If I have caused harm, I apologize and fix the situation. And then I take a deep breath, relax, breathe out, and re-focus my efforts back on my work and goals. I am guided by these two phrases: “Nothing matters.” – I can only work towards my big goals and my vision of helping others, while the opinions of others do not matter. “It will all be over soon.” – Everything, both good and bad, comes to an end. I must enjoy the good while it lasts, and persevere through the bad until I have beaten it. Everything that happens to me—good and bad—is my personal responsibility. I blame no one but myself. These are the choices I’ve made—this is the life I’m living. I accept the consequences of my actions. I will help ten million men and women transform their lives. I will not be the person I don’t want to be. I will not be petty, jealous, or envious, or give in to any other of those lazy emotions. I will not gossip or speak badly of others, no matter who I am with or what environment I am in. I will not be negative when it is easier to be positive. I will not hurt others when it is possible to help. I will know the temptations, situations and environments in life that I must avoid, and I will, in fact, avoid them, even if it means loosening relationships with others who “live” in those environments. It’s my life and that matters more than what other people think of me. “I will always keep the child within me alive.” – Frank McKinney. I will make time to laugh and play every day. “I will write with honesty and feeling.” – Ted Nicholas. The opinion of others does not matter. What matters is the number of people that I can help by sharing advice and encouragement in my writing. My 12 Rules have made me much happier

That night, the tent that I had been alone in for so long was suddenly heaving with bodies, and piles of rope and kit--with Neil, Geoffrey, and Graham squeezed in beside me. I tried to drink as much boiled water as I could get down. I knew that I would need to be as hydrated as I could possibly be to tackle what lay ahead. So I drank and I peed. But still my pee was dark brown. It was almost impossible to hydrate at this altitude. The ritual of peeing into a water bottle had become second nature to us all, even in the dark, and even with someone’s head inches away from the bottle. We each had two bottles: one for pee, one for water. It was worth having a good system to remember which was which. At 10:00 P.M. I needed to pee--again. I grabbed my bottle, crouched over and filled it. I screwed it shut--or so I thought--then settled back into my bag to try and find some elusive sleep. Soon I felt the dampness creeping through my clothes. You have got to be joking. I swore to myself as I scrambled to the crouch position again. I looked down. The cap was hanging loosely off the pee bottle. Dark, stinking brown pee had soaked through all my clothes and sleeping bag. I obviously hadn’t done it up properly. Brute of a mistake. Maybe an omen for what lay ahead. On that note I fell asleep.

emmersmacks: Hold on emmersmacks: Wait emmersmacks: So you stood up for him? MirkerLurker: Yeah. emmersmacks: . . . Im failing to see the issue here E emmersmacks: Did they hurt you?? MirkerLurker: No . . . not really. Just took my sketchbook and threw it around a little. MirkerLurker: Okay look I know it doesn’t sound that bad MirkerLurker: But, like, you don’t understand the way this guy looks at me. He’s one of those where it’s like, “Why are you even standing in front of me, you’re uglier than the stuff I crap out after eating too muchChipotle.” 3:19 p.m. (Apocalypse_Cow has joined the message) Apocalypse_Cow: i feel like i came in at a bad time. i’ll go. emmersmacks: E is having a crisis Apocalypse_Cow: crisis over what? MirkerLurker: Just this stupid new kid at school who may or may not be a fanficwriter for Monstrous Sea and who definitely thinks I am the scum of the earth. emmersmacks: Why would he think that?? You stood up for him MirkerLurker: I don’t know! Because I emasculated him, probably. Or something. Max, I need advice from someone who’s felt emasculated. Apocalypse_Cow: why would you immediately assume i’ve felt emasculated before? MirkerLurker: Because you’re the only male here. Apocalypse_Cow: if you want to know if some guys feel emasculated when a girl stands up to a bully for them, then unfortunately i must say that yes, that does happen. Apocalypse_Cow: BUT NOT ME. Apocalypse_Cow: LET IT BE KNOWN THAT MAX CHOPRA HAS NEVER FELT EMASCULATED. Apocalypse_Cow: but really, did this guy say something to you? why feel so bad about it? MirkerLurker: He didn’t say ANYTHING. That’s the problem! MirkerLurker: He just stood there and wouldn’t even look at me. emmersmacks: Did you say anything MirkerLurker: . . . No. emmersmacks: Well emmersmacks: E emmersmacks: There you might have a problem Apocalypse_Cow: you’re getting schooled in social skills by a twelve-year-old in college. how does that feel emmersmacks: Im fourteen not twelve emmersmacks: Asshole Apocalypse_Cow: wait, he left a note in your sketchbook? what did it say? MirkerLurker: It said thanks, and that the pictures were good. emmersmacks: OH MY GOD emmersmacks: THATS WHY HE DIDNT TALK MirkerLurker: What? emmersmacks: HE WAS TOO NERVOUS emmersmacks: AW HE LIKES YOU E MirkerLurker: I really really doubt that. MirkerLurker: Like, I mean, REALLY doubt it. MirkerLurker: He’s not exactly the kind of guy that’s usually interested in me. Apocalypse_Cow: what kind of guy is usually interested in you? MirkerLurker: The kind I make up in my head. Apocalypse_Cow: wooooooooooooooooooooooow Apocalypse_Cow: woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow Apocalypse_Cow: woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow Apocalypse_Cow: do you want me to go ahead and fill your house with cats right now, or do you want to put that off for a few years? MirkerLurker: Har har

Mario'd fallen in love with the first Madame Psychosis programs because he felt like he was listening to someone sad read out loud from yellow letters she'd taken out of a shoebox on a rainy p.m., stuff about heartbreak and people you loved dying and U.S. woe, stuff that was real. It is increasingly hard to find valid art that is about stuff that is real in this way. The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone at E.T.A. over the age of about Kent Blott finds stuff that's really real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed. It's like there's some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn't happy. The worstfeeling thing that happened today was at lunch when Michael Pemulis told Mario he had an idea for setting up a Dial-a-Prayer telephone service for atheists in which the atheist dials the number and the line just rings and rings and no one answers. It was a joke and a good one, and Mario got it; what was unpleasant was that Mario was the only one at the big table whose laugh was a happy laugh; everybody else sort of looked down like they were laughing at somebody with a disability. The whole issue was far above Mario's head, and he was unable to understand Lyle's replies when he tried to bring the confusion up. And Hal was for once no help, because Hal seemed even more uncomfortable and embarrassed than the fellows at lunch, and when Mario brought up real stuff Hal called him Booboo and acted like he'd wet himself and Hal was going to be very patient about helping him change.

Gary Cooper called to invite me to a dinner party he was giving for Clark Gable at his house. When I accepted and he asked if I would mind picking up Barbara Stanwyck, I was delighted. I had always thought she was one of the greatest. The Lady Eve and Double Indemnity are two of my favorite films and feature two of the many terrific performances she gave through the years. I arrived at her door promptly at 6:30 P.M., a huge bouquet of pink peonies in hand. The maid said she would be right down, took the flowers, and offered me a glass of champagne. Barbara came down a few minutes later, looking terrific in something silver and slinky. She carried on about the flowers as the maid brought them in and joined me for some champagne. I was anxious to get things off to a good start with the right kind of small talk, but unfortunately I was out of touch with the latest gossip. I asked how and where her husband was. An expletive told me how she felt about her husband: “That son of a bitch ran off with some kraut starlet.” As I struggled to pull my foot out of my mouth, she started to laugh and said, “Don’t worry about it, baby, he’s not worth sweating over,” and the rest of the evening went like gangbusters. We arrived at 7:30 on the dot and were met at the door by Rocky, Mrs. Gary Cooper, who hugged Barbara and said, “He’s going to be so glad to see you.” Cooper and Stanwyck had made a couple of great films together, Meet John Doe and Ball of Fire, the latter for Sam Goldwyn, whom she liked even though she referred to him as “that tough old bastard.” Rocky sent Barbara out to the garden to see Coop, took my arm, and showed me around their lovely home. As we walked into the garden, I spotted him laughing with Barbara. Rocky took me over to meet him. He was tall, lean, warm, and friendly. The thing I remember most about him is the twinkle in his deep blue eyes, which were framed by thick dark lashes. He was a movie star.

Once unbound from the shackles of truth, Fox’s power came from what it decided to cover—its chosen narratives—and what it decided to ignore. Trump’s immature, erratic, and immoral behavior? His sucking up to Putin? His mingling of presidential business and personal profit? Fox talk shows played dumb and targeted the “deep state” instead. Conservative media types were like spiders, spinning webs and trying to catch prey. They insisted the real story was an Obama-led plot against Trump to stop him from winning the election. One night Hannity irrationally exclaimed, “This makes Watergate look like stealing a Snickers bar from a drugstore!” Another night he upped the hysteria, insisting this scandal “will make Watergate look like a parking ticket.” The following night he screeched, “This is Watergate times a thousand.” He strung viewers along, invoking mysterious “sources” who were “telling us” that “this is just the tip of the iceberg.” There was always another “iceberg” ahead, always another twist coming, always another Democrat villain to attack after the commercial break. Hannity and Trump were so aligned that, on one weird night in 2018, Hannity had to deny that he was giving Trump a sneak peek at his monologues after the president tweeted out, twelve minutes before air, “Big show tonight on @SeanHannity! 9: 00 P.M. on @FoxNews.” Political reporters fumbled for their remotes and flipped over to Fox en masse. Hannity raved about the “Mueller crime family” and said the Russia investigation was “corrupt” and promoted a guest who said Mueller “surrounded himself with literally a bunch of legal terrorists,” whatever that meant. Some reporters who did not watch Fox regularly were shocked at how unhinged and extreme the content was. But this was just an ordinary night in the pro-Trump alternative universe. Night after night, Hannity said the Mueller probe needed to be stopped immediately, for the good of the country. Trump’s attempts at obstruction flowed directly from his “Executive Time.

The next day’s call would be vital. Then at 12:02 P.M., the radio came to life. “Bear at camp two, it’s Neil. All okay?” I heard the voice loud and clear. “Hungry for news,” I replied, smiling. He knew exactly what I meant. “Now listen, I’ve got a forecast and an e-mail that’s come through for you from your family. Do you want to hear the good news or the bad news first?” “Go on, then, let’s get the bad news over with,” I replied. “Well, the weather’s still lousy. The typhoon is now on the move again, and heading this way. If it’s still on course tomorrow you’ve got to get down, and fast. Sorry.” “And the good news?” I asked hopefully. “Your mother sent a message via the weather guys. She says all the animals at home are well.” Click. “Well, go on, that can’t be it. What else?” “Well, they think you’re still at base camp. Probably best that way. I’ll speak to you tomorrow.” “Thanks, buddy. Oh, and pray for change. It will be our last chance.” “Roger that, Bear. Don’t start talking to yourself. Out.” I had another twenty-four hours to wait. It was hell. Knowingly feeling my body get weaker and weaker in the vain hope of a shot at the top. I was beginning to doubt both myself and my decision to stay so high. I crept outside long before dawn. It was 4:30 A.M. I sat huddled, waiting for the sun to rise while sitting in the porch of my tent. My mind wandered to being up there--up higher on this unforgiving mountain of attrition. Would I ever get a shot at climbing in that deathly land above camp three? By 10:00 A.M. I was ready on the radio. This time, though, they called early. “Bear, your God is shining on you. It’s come!” Henry’s voice was excited. “The cyclone has spun off to the east. We’ve got a break. A small break. They say the jet-stream winds are lifting again in two days. How do you think you feel? Do you have any strength left?” “We’re rocking, yeah, good, I mean fine. I can’t believe it.” I leapt to my feet, tripped over the tent’s guy ropes, and let out a squeal of sheer joy. These last five days had been the longest of my life.

Dontchev was born in Bulgaria and emigrated to America as a young kid when his father, a mathematician, took a job at the University of Michigan. He got an undergraduate and graduate degree in aerospace engineering, which led to what he thought was his dream opportunity: an internship at Boeing. But he quickly became disenchanted and decided to visit a friend who was working at SpaceX. “I will never forget walking the floor that day,” he says. “All the young engineers working their asses off and wearing T-shirts and sporting tattoos and being really badass about getting things done. I thought, ‘These are my people.’ It was nothing like the buttoned-up deadly vibe at Boeing.” That summer, he made a presentation to a VP at Boeing about how SpaceX was enabling the younger engineers to innovate. “If Boeing doesn’t change,” he said, “you’re going to lose out on the top talent.” The VP replied that Boeing was not looking for disrupters. “Maybe we want the people who aren’t the best, but who will stick around longer.” Dontchev quit. At a conference in Utah, he went to a party thrown by SpaceX and, after a couple of drinks, worked up the nerve to corner Gwynne Shotwell. He pulled a crumpled résumé out of his pocket and showed her a picture of the satellite hardware he had worked on. “I can make things happen,” he told her. Shotwell was amused. “Anyone who is brave enough to come up to me with a crumpled-up résumé might be a good candidate,” she said. She invited him to SpaceX for interviews. He was scheduled to see Musk, who was still interviewing every engineer hired, at 3 p.m. As usual, Musk got backed up, and Dontchev was told he would have to come back another day. Instead, Dontchev sat outside Musk’s cubicle for five hours. When he finally got in to see Musk at 8 p.m., Dontchev took the opportunity to unload about how his gung-ho approach wasn’t valued at Boeing. When hiring or promoting, Musk made a point of prioritizing attitude over résumé skills. And his definition of a good attitude was a desire to work maniacally hard. Musk hired Dontchev on the spot.

As a nine-year-old, the circadian rhythm would have the child asleep by around nine p.m., driven in part by the rising tide of melatonin at this time in children. By the time that same individual has reached sixteen years of age, their circadian rhythm has undergone a dramatic shift forward in its cycling phase. The rising tide of melatonin, and the instruction of darkness and sleep, is many hours away. As a consequence, the sixteen-year-old will usually have no interest in sleeping at nine p.m. Instead, peak wakefulness is usually still in play at that hour. By the time the parents are getting tired, as their circadian rhythms take a downturn and melatonin release instructs sleep—perhaps around ten or eleven p.m., their teenager can still be wide awake. A few more hours must pass before the circadian rhythm of a teenage brain begins to shut down alertness and allow for easy, sound sleep to begin. This, of course, leads to much angst and frustration for all parties involved on the back end of sleep. Parents want their teenager to be awake at a “reasonable” hour of the morning. Teenagers, on the other hand, having only been capable of initiating sleep some hours after their parents, can still be in their trough of the circadian downswing. Like an animal prematurely wrenched out of hibernation too early, the adolescent brain still needs more sleep and more time to complete the circadian cycle before it can operate efficiently, without grogginess. If this remains perplexing to parents, a different way to frame and perhaps appreciate the mismatch is this: asking your teenage son or daughter to go to bed and fall asleep at ten p.m. is the circadian equivalent of asking you, their parent, to go to sleep at seven or eight p.m. No matter how loud you enunciate the order, no matter how much that teenager truly wishes to obey your instruction, and no matter what amount of willed effort is applied by either of the two parties, the circadian rhythm of a teenager will not be miraculously coaxed into a change. Furthermore, asking that same teenager to wake up at seven the next morning and function with intellect, grace, and good mood is the equivalent of asking you, their parent, to do the same at four or five a.m. Sadly, neither society nor our parental attitudes are well designed to appreciate or accept that teenagers need more sleep than adults, and that they are biologically wired to obtain that sleep at a different time from their parents. It’s very understandable for parents to feel frustrated in this way, since they believe that their teenager’s sleep patterns reflect a conscious choice and not a biological edict. But non-volitional, non-negotiable, and strongly biological they are. We parents would be wise to accept this fact, and to embrace it, encourage it, and praise it, lest we wish our own children to suffer developmental brain abnormalities or force a raised risk of mental illness upon them.

8:00am The sun is shining, the cows are mooing, and I am ready for the mines. I hope I find something awesome today. Steve has told me about some pretty crazy things I had no idea existed. According to him, I must find empty tombs in the desert. That’s where the real treasures are. For today, I will stick to regular mining. Who knows, maybe I will come across an abandoned mine shaft; could be my lucky day.   12:30pm I was forced to come home for lunch today because I had too much stuff to carry. I was getting low on my iron ore, gold, and lapis lazuli stocks before this mine trip. It’s amazing how quick lapis goes when you are busy enchanting everything but the kitchen sink. I’d enchant that too if I had one. I wonder what an enchanted kitchen sink would do. Would it do my dishes for me? That would be so cool.   I have plenty of both now. I can make some new armor and enchant it! I love mining.   Steve decided to join me for lunch and we ate a couple of pork chops and some cake. I love cake! We ate until no more food could fill us up. Then, Steve had the guts to brag about how, when he mines, he takes a horse with extra storage so he can stay down there all day long. Well fancy you, Steve.   He also went on to tell me about how well the crops are doing these days. He thinks it’s because he is looking after them half of the time. What he doesn’t know is I throw bone marrow on them when I am working. Makes my job faster and gives me more free time so whatever you need to tell yourself, Steve.   Life may be easier switching every day between mines and farming, but it still doesn’t make me his biggest fan. I just don’t think he needs to fall in a hole, either. At least… Not right now. I would consider us to be frienemies; Friendly enemies. Yes. At times we pretend to get along, but most of the time, we are happiest doing our own thing.   6:00pm Mining this afternoon was super fun… Not! I got attacked by a partially hidden skeleton guy. I couldn’t see him enough to strike back until half of my life hearts were gone. I must not have made the space bright enough. Those guys are nasty. They are hard to kill too. If you don’t have a bow and arrow you might as well surrender. Plus, they kind of smell like death. Yuck.   Note to self: Bring more torches on the next mining day.   On the other hand, I came back with an overshare of Redstone, too much iron for my own good, and oddly, quite a few diamonds. I won’t be sharing the diamonds with anyone. They are far too precious. They will go to some new diamond pickaxes, and maybe some armor. Hmm, I could enchant those too! The iron and Redstone though, I am thinking a trip to the village may be in order. See what those up-tight weirdos are willing to trade me.   For now, it’s bedtime.   6:10pm You can only sleep at night. You can only sleep at night. You can only sleep at night.   6:11pm That stupid rule gets me every time. Why can’t I decide when it’s bed time?   First, I will go eat a cookie, then I will go to sleep. Day Thirty-Three   3:00am I just dreamt that our world was made of cookies.

What’ll it be?” Steve asked me, just days after our wedding. “Do we go on the honeymoon we’ve got planned, or do you want to go catch crocs?” My head was still spinning from the ceremony, the celebration, and the fact that I could now use the two words “my husband” and have them mean something real. The four months between February 2, 1992--the day Steve asked me to marry him--and our wedding day on June 4 had been a blur. Steve’s mother threw us an engagement party for Queensland friends and family, and I encountered a very common theme: “We never thought Steve would get married.” Everyone said it--relatives, old friends, and schoolmates. I’d smile and nod, but my inner response was, Well, we’ve got that in common. And something else: Wait until I get home and tell everybody I am moving to Australia. I knew what I’d have to explain. Being with Steve, running the zoo, and helping the crocs was exactly the right thing to do. I knew with all my heart and soul that this was the path I was meant to travel. My American friends--the best, closest ones--understood this perfectly. I trusted Steve with my life and loved him desperately. One of the first challenges was how to bring as many Australian friends and family as possible over to the United States for the wedding. None of us had a lot of money. Eleven people wound up making the trip from Australia, and we held the ceremony in the big Methodist church my grandmother attended. It was more than a wedding, it was saying good-bye to everyone I’d ever known. I invited everybody, even people who may not have been intimate friends. I even invited my dentist. The whole network of wildlife rehabilitators came too--four hundred people in all. The ceremony began at eight p.m., with coffee and cake afterward. I wore the same dress that my older sister Bonnie had worn at her wedding twenty-seven years earlier, and my sister Tricia wore at her wedding six years after that. The wedding cake had white frosting, but it was decorated with real flowers instead of icing ones. Steve had picked out a simple ring for me, a quarter carat, exactly what I wanted. He didn’t have a wedding ring. We were just going to borrow one for the service, but we couldn’t find anybody with fingers that were big enough. It turned out that my dad’s wedding ring fitted him, and that’s the one we used. Steve’s mother, Lyn, gave me a silk horseshoe to put around my wrist, a symbol of good luck. On our wedding day, June 4, 1992, it had been eight months since Steve and I first met. As the minister started reading the vows, I could see that Steve was nervous. His tuxedo looked like it was strangling him. For a man who was used to working in the tropics, he sure looked hot. The church was air-conditioned, but sweat drops formed on the ends of his fingers. Poor Steve, I thought. He’d never been up in front of such a big crowd before. “The scariest situation I’ve ever been in,” Steve would say later of the ceremony. This from a man who wrangled crocodiles! When the minister invited the groom to kiss the bride, I could feel all Steve’s energy, passion, and love. I realized without a doubt we were doing the right thing.

Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” Ladies and Gentlemen of the class of '99: Wear sunscreen. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now. Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth; oh never mind; you will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine. Don’t worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4:00 pm on some idle Tuesday. Do one thing everyday that scares you. Sing. Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts; don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours. Floss. Don’t waste your time on jealousy; sometimes you’re ahead; sometimes you’re behind; the race is long, and in the end it’s only with yourself. Remember compliments you receive; forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how. Keep your old love letters; throw away your old bank statements. Stretch. Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you wanna do with your life; the most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives; some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don’t. Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees; you’ll miss them when they’re gone. Maybe you’ll marry -- maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll have children -- maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll divorce at 40 -- maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either -- your choices are half chance; so are everybody else’s. Enjoy your body; use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it. It’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own. Dance. even if you have nowhere to do it but in your own living room. Read the directions, even if you don’t follow them. Do not read beauty magazines; they will only make you feel ugly. Get to know your parents; you never know when they’ll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings; they're your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future. Understand that friends come and go, but for the precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography, in lifestyle, because the older you get the more you need the people you knew when you were young. Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel. Accept certain inalienable truths: prices will rise; politicians will philander; you too will get old, and when you do you’ll fantasize that when you were young prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders. Respect your elders. Don’t expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund; maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse; but you never know when either one might run out. Don’t mess too much with your hair, or by the time you're 40, it will look 85. Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia: dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than it’s worth. But trust me on the sunscreen. Baz Luhrmannk, William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet (1996)

Stick to a sleep schedule. Go to bed and wake up at the same time each day. As creatures of habit, people have a hard time adjusting to changes in sleep patterns. Sleeping later on weekends won’t fully make up for a lack of sleep during the week and will make it harder to wake up early on Monday morning. Set an alarm for bedtime. Often we set an alarm for when it’s time to wake up but fail to do so for when it’s time to go to sleep. If there is only one piece of advice you remember and take from these twelve tips, this should be it. Exercise is great, but not too late in the day. Try to exercise at least thirty minutes on most days but not later than two to three hours before your bedtime. Avoid caffeine and nicotine. Coffee, colas, certain teas, and chocolate contain the stimulant caffeine, and its effects can take as long as eight hours to wear off fully. Therefore, a cup of coffee in the late afternoon can make it hard for you to fall asleep at night. Nicotine is also a stimulant, often causing smokers to sleep only very lightly. In addition, smokers often wake up too early in the morning because of nicotine withdrawal. Avoid alcoholic drinks before bed. Having a nightcap or alcoholic beverage before sleep may help you relax, but heavy use robs you of REM sleep, keeping you in the lighter stages of sleep. Heavy alcohol ingestion also may contribute to impairment in breathing at night. You also tend to wake up in the middle of the night when the effects of the alcohol have worn off. Avoid large meals and beverages late at night. A light snack is okay, but a large meal can cause indigestion, which interferes with sleep. Drinking too many fluids at night can cause frequent awakenings to urinate. If possible, avoid medicines that delay or disrupt your sleep. Some commonly prescribed heart, blood pressure, or asthma medications, as well as some over-the-counter and herbal remedies for coughs, colds, or allergies, can disrupt sleep patterns. If you have trouble sleeping, talk to your health care provider or pharmacist to see whether any drugs you’re taking might be contributing to your insomnia and ask whether they can be taken at other times during the day or early in the evening. Don’t take naps after 3 p.m. Naps can help make up for lost sleep, but late afternoon naps can make it harder to fall asleep at night. Relax before bed. Don’t overschedule your day so that no time is left for unwinding. A relaxing activity, such as reading or listening to music, should be part of your bedtime ritual. Take a hot bath before bed. The drop in body temperature after getting out of the bath may help you feel sleepy, and the bath can help you relax and slow down so you’re more ready to sleep. Dark bedroom, cool bedroom, gadget-free bedroom. Get rid of anything in your bedroom that might distract you from sleep, such as noises, bright lights, an uncomfortable bed, or warm temperatures. You sleep better if the temperature in the room is kept on the cool side. A TV, cell phone, or computer in the bedroom can be a distraction and deprive you of needed sleep. Having a comfortable mattress and pillow can help promote a good night’s sleep. Individuals who have insomnia often watch the clock. Turn the clock’s face out of view so you don’t worry about the time while trying to fall asleep. Have the right sunlight exposure. Daylight is key to regulating daily sleep patterns. Try to get outside in natural sunlight for at least thirty minutes each day. If possible, wake up with the sun or use very bright lights in the morning. Sleep experts recommend that, if you have problems falling asleep, you should get an hour of exposure to morning sunlight and turn down the lights before bedtime. Don’t lie in bed awake. If you find yourself still awake after staying in bed for more than twenty minutes or if you are starting to feel anxious or worried, get up and do some relaxing activity until you feel sleepy.

Don’t leave your room again until I get there.” Holly’s heart leaped; then her eyes filled with tears. “You’re coming here?” “My plane leaves Missoula at six o’clock tomorrow morning. I’ll be in St. Louis around 2:00 p.m. if there are no delays.” “Thank you, Bud, thank you so much.” “I don’t need thanks.” Holly shivered. The gruff, raspy tone in his voice rattled her. Even as she asked the question, she knew what he was going to say. “What do you need?” “Just you, baby.” “That scares me, too,” she whispered. Bud pinched the bridge of his nose to quell a surge of panic. Was this where she told him that she didn’t feel the same way he did? He had to make it right. He couldn’t bear it if she suddenly became afraid or uneasy around him. “It’s okay. I shouldn’t have ever said anything to—” “No, you misunderstand me,” Holly said softly. “I’m not scared of you. I’ve loved you for years.” Bud could have wept with relief. “Then it’s all good,” he said softly. “I just want you to stay safe until I can get to you. Can you promise to do that for me?” “I didn’t leave the room all day,” Holly said. “I won’t budge until you get here, I promise.” “Thank you, honey,” he said. “It’s going to be okay. We’ll get through this thing you’re dealing with, but we’ll do it together, so you won’t be in any danger, okay?” “Okay.” “I love you, Holly.” The breath caught in Holly’s throat. “I love you, too.” “Thank you, God,” Bud said, and hung up.

Draw a line in the sand As you get going, keep in mind why you’re doing what you’re doing. Great businesses have a point of view, not just a product or service. You have to believe in something. You need to have a backbone. You need to know what you’re willing to fight for. And then you need to show the world. A strong stand is how you attract superfans. They point to you and defend you. And they spread the word further, wider, and more passionately than any advertising could. Strong opinions aren’t free. You’ll turn some people off. They’ll accuse you of being arrogant and aloof. That’s life. For everyone who loves you, there will be others who hate you. If no one’s upset by what you’re saying, you’re probably not pushing hard enough. (And you’re probably boring, too.) Lots of people hate us because our products do less than the competition’s. They’re insulted when we refuse to include their pet feature. But we’re just as proud of what our products don’t do as we are of what they do. We design them to be simple because we believe most software is too complex: too many features, too many buttons, too much confusion. So we build software that’s the opposite of that. If what we make isn’t right for everyone, that’s OK. We’re willing to lose some customers if it means that others love our products intensely. That’s our line in the sand. When you don’t know what you believe, everything becomes an argument. Everything is debatable. But when you stand for something, decisions are obvious. For example, Whole Foods stands for selling the highest quality natural and organic products available. They don’t waste time deciding over and over again what’s appropriate. No one asks, “Should we sell this product that has artificial flavors?” There’s no debate. The answer is clear. That’s why you can’t buy a Coke or a Snickers there. This belief means the food is more expensive at Whole Foods. Some haters even call it Whole Paycheck and make fun of those who shop there. But so what? Whole Foods is doing pretty damn well. Another example is Vinnie’s Sub Shop, just down the street from our office in Chicago. They put this homemade basil oil on subs that’s just perfect. You better show up on time, though. Ask when they close and the woman behind the counter will respond, “We close when the bread runs out.” Really? “Yeah. We get our bread from the bakery down the street early in the morning, when it’s the freshest. Once we run out (usually around two or three p.m.), we close up shop. We could get more bread later in the day, but it’s not as good as the fresh-baked bread in the morning. There’s no point in selling a few more sandwiches if the bread isn’t good. A few bucks isn’t going to make up for selling food we can’t be proud of.” Wouldn’t you rather eat at a place like that instead of some generic sandwich chain?

who got an MBA after starting as a PM at Microsoft, decided to go to business school when he noticed that well-designed products didn’t always become market winners. “I saw that good design isn’t enough,” Arjun noted. “There’s something else, and I wanted to learn what that something else is. In business school I realized you could ask business questions and answer them really easily, on the back of a napkin.

To the point Sandeep Unnithan | 139 words Gone are the days of long file notings for the Prime Minister to pore over. Unlike his predecessor, Narendra Modi is not the one to go through details of every file that is sent to him.The PMO has given out instructions that briefings will be preferred to files, especially those accompanied by a crisp PowerPoint presentation. The number of slides should range between five and 10. However, insiders confirm that exceptions are often made as officials plead for more space to make their point. To the PM's credit,he is a good listener who reserves his judgment for the end.

1948, my uncles offered me a special treat. They visited Mother, while I was in Queens to see visiting friends from Bucharest. Max and Morris thought it would be a good idea for me to visit Bernie and his family in Miami. Morris called me at the Teitelbaums and asked whether I was afraid of flying. Of course, I had never flown - but, of course, I was not afraid. They reserved a ticket for me; I came home in a hurry and by 11 p.m. that night I was on my way to Florida, from Newark. (Kennedy Airport had not been in existence yet). Bernie did not even know about my arrival. It was a glorious morning when I landed. I took a taxi and reached his house around five in the morning. Not wanting to wake them up, I sat in front of the house and watched the lovely, sunny surroundings - palm trees and flowering bushes, a delight to the eye. When somebody stirred inside, I rang the bell.

The commissar, Mr. Andreescu arrived after five (they enjoyed a siesta from 2-5 p.m.), called us into his office and told me that he would write a declaration, which Father should sign. I told him that, in case he would write that we have a radio, he won't sign. The commissar told me to let him write it and if I don't agree, then I should write another one. It sounded good. He typed a statement and handed it to me. In it Father declared that he had never had a radio. When I told him that we had had one, but the Russians had confiscated it, he retorted: It is better to say that you never had one.

You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit …that will last….” —John 15:16 (NIV) Hi, Dad,” the voice on the phone said, a bit muffled and faraway. “Oh, it’s you, Will.” You can always recognize your children’s voices, even as they grow older and more mature. “Can you hear me better now?” It sounded like he was in the office next door. I went through a quick mental calculation. Today was Monday. That meant he was in Singapore, part of a weeklong trip for his job. “Yes, it’s very clear. What time is it there?” I looked at the clock: 5:30 pm in New York City. “Five thirty in the morning on Tuesday. Singapore is twelve hours ahead. I’m still jet-lagged.” “How was your trip?” “I had a seventeen-hour layover in Tokyo. I took the train in from the airport and the train back, so I saw a little of the city.” “Sounds great.” “Maybe I’ll go back sometime and see more of it. I can’t stay on the phone long, Dad. I have a meeting soon with the office in California and wanted to be sure I could get good reception, so I had to choose somebody to talk to. I chose you.” I chose you. “I’m glad you did. I hope the meeting goes well.” “It should. Love you, Dad.” “Love you, Will.” I put down the phone and pondered his words for a moment: “I chose you.” It’s often said our families are given to us, but our friends we get to choose. It occurred to me we choose our families too. We make choices about being close to them, staying in touch, nurturing relationships that run deeper than blood. There’s a lot to be said for a two-minute conversation from across the world. Let me always choose to love, Lord. —Rick Hamlin

Big Little Lies (Liane Moriarty) - Your Highlight on Location 2738-2740 | Added on Monday, April 13, 2015 4:07:05 PM It will rain again. I will get sick again. I will have bad days. But can’t I enjoy the good times while they last? But then why am I here at all?

I asked them when I could get my household goods delivered.  At first they told me ten days, but when I started screaming at them they apologized and said they had the wrong Captain Spicer, the other guy was a Navy Captain, so in my case they could be there to unload tomorrow afternoon but not till about three pm.  I was pretty sure they were lying about a Navy Captain.

Good Daily Habits Work Week Checklist (Sample Items) I read industry-related material a half-hour today. I ran 30 minutes today. I completed 80% of my to-do list today. I called at least one prospect today. I did not waste time on the Internet today. I said “DO IT NOW” when I did not want to do something today. I stopped myself from saying something sarcastic today. I stopped myself from saying something inappropriate today. I stopped myself from talking today when I realized I was talking too much. I ate no more than 2,000 calories today. I limited myself to two beers today. I left the office after 6 p.m. today. I called one person today, just to say hello. I called someone today to wish him or her a happy birthday.

Her eyes are sometimes the colour of a May sky at 2:00pm on a Saturday, and sometimes they are the colour of polar bear ice.

At 9.03 pm on June 21, 1982 Diana produced the son and heir which was cause for national rejoicing. When the Queen came to visit her grandchild the following day her comment was typical. As she looked at the tiny bundle she said drily: “Thank goodness he hasn’t got ears like his father.” The second in line to the throne was still known officially as “Baby Wales” and it took the couple several days of discussion before they arrived at a name. Prince Charles admitted as much: “We’ve thought of one or two. There’s a bit of an argument about it, but we’ll find one eventually.” Charles wanted to call his first son “Arthur” and his second “Albert”, after Queen Victoria’s consort. William and Harry were Diana’s choices while her husband’s preferences were taken into account in their children’s middle names.

The Wall Street Journal (The Wall Street Journal) - Clip This Article on Location 1055 | Added on Tuesday, May 5, 2015 5:10:24 PM OPINION Baltimore Is Not About Race Government-induced dependency is the problem—and it’s one with a long history. By William McGurn | 801 words For those who see the rioting in Baltimore as primarily about race, two broad reactions dominate. One group sees rampaging young men fouling their own neighborhoods and concludes nothing can be done because the social pathologies are so overwhelming. In some cities, this view manifests itself in the unspoken but cynical policing that effectively cedes whole neighborhoods to the thugs. The other group tut-tuts about root causes. Take your pick: inequality, poverty, injustice. Or, as President Obama intimated in an ugly aside on the rioting, a Republican Congress that will never agree to the “massive investments” (in other words, billions more in federal spending) required “if we are serious about solving this problem.” There is another view. In this view, the disaster of inner cities isn’t primarily about race at all. It’s about the consequences of 50 years of progressive misrule—which on race has proved an equal-opportunity failure. Baltimore is but the latest liberal-blue city where government has failed to do the one thing it ought—i.e., put the cops on the side of the vulnerable and law-abiding—while pursuing “solutions” that in practice enfeeble families and social institutions and local economies. These supposed solutions do this by substituting federal transfers for fathers and families. They do it by favoring community organizing and government projects over private investment. And they do it by propping up failing public-school systems that operate as jobs programs for the teachers unions instead of centers of learning. If our inner-city African-American communities suffer disproportionately from crippling social pathologies that make upward mobility difficult—and they do—it is in large part because they have disproportionately been on the receiving end of this five-decade-long progressive experiment in government beneficence. How do we know? Because when we look at a slice of white America that was showered with the same Great Society good intentions—Appalachia—we find the same dysfunctions: greater dependency, more single-parent families and the absence of the good, private-sector jobs that only a growing economy can create. Remember, in the mid-1960s when President Johnson put a face on America’s “war on poverty,” he didn’t do it from an urban ghetto. He did it from the front porch of a shack in eastern Kentucky’s Martin County, where a white family of 10 eked out a subsistence living on an income of $400 a year. In many ways, rural Martin County and urban Baltimore could not be more different. Martin County is 92% white while Baltimore is two-thirds black. Each has seen important sources of good-paying jobs dry up—Martin County in coal mining, Baltimore in manufacturing. In the last presidential election, Martin Country voted 6 to 1 for Mitt Romney while Baltimore went 9 to 1 for Barack Obama. Yet the Great Society’s legacy has been depressingly similar. In a remarkable dispatch two years ago, the Lexington Herald-Leader’s John Cheves noted that the war on poverty sent $2.1 billion to Martin County alone (pop. 12,537) through programs including “welfare, food stamps, jobless benefits, disability compensation, school subsidies, affordable housing, worker training, economic development incentives, Head Start for poor children and expanded Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.” The result? “The problem facing Appalachia today isn’t Third World poverty,” writes Mr. Cheves. “It’s dependence on government assistance.” Just one example: When Congress imposed work requirements and lifetime caps for welfare during the Clinton administration, claims of disability jumped. Mr. Cheves quotes

Sean checked his watch, grimaced, and lengthened his stride down the hallway. He’d make it to the high school—but only if he skirted around town instead of cutting through. It was 12:40 p.m. and the downtown streets would be clogged with motorists battling for lunch hour parking. He was halfway down the granite steps when he spotted Dave and Evelyn standing beside his car in the lot reserved for official use. He raised an eyebrow at the twin smiles of angelic innocence on their faces. “What are you two doing, camped out here?” “That should be obvious,” his secretary replied. “You tipped your hand when you canceled your lunch with Ferrucci and the oh-so-friendly developers. So Dave and I decided we might as well share the ride. No point in taking separate cars when we can carpool.” He made a show of looking at his watch. “You want a lift to the deli for sandwiches? Fine, hop on in.” Evelyn made a clucking noise with her tongue. Her pink curls shook slightly. “Sean, we’re your friends. If we’re willing to admit to unholy curiosity, then you should, too.” Dave merely nodded in agreement, wisely holding his tongue. A good thing, too. These days, Sean’s temper had a real short fuse, wired to explode. He didn’t want to throttle his best friend in the town hall parking lot. Sean had thought it would be easier not to see Lily, but he’d been wrong. Just knowing she was near had him craving even a glimpse of her. It was a gnawing hunger that nothing could appease . . . except her.

ROUTINES FOR BREASTFED BABIES FROM ONE TO EIGHT WEEKS OLD Routine for a breastfed baby aged one to two weeks This routine is for a baby aged seven to thirteen days old (and until she regains her birth weight and is over 3 kg). Feed times 7 am 10 am 1 pm 4 pm 6 pm 9.30 pm 2.30 am (at the latest) Sleep times 8.15 am 11.30 am 2.30 pm Bedtime 7 pm 6.40 am Express as much as you can, up to 90 ml, from your right breast. 7 am Wake your baby up and feed her for up to 25 minutes from your left breast. You will wake and feed her even if she last fed at 5.30 am, so she is always starting her day at the same time and on a full tummy. Then feed her for up to fifteen minutes from your right breast. 8.15 am Swaddle your baby and put her in bed on her back awake and allow her to self-settle (see guide to self-settling starting here). 9.40 am Express as much as you can, up to 90 ml, from your left breast. 10 am Wake your baby up and feed her for up to 25 minutes from your right breast. Then feed her for up to 15 minutes from your left breast. 11.30 am Swaddle your baby and put her in bed on her back awake and allow her to self-settle. 1 pm Wake your baby up and feed her for up to 25 minutes from your left breast. Then feed her for up to 25 minutes from your right breast. 2.30 pm Swaddle your baby and put her down in bed on her back awake and allow her to self-settle. 4 pm Wake your baby up and feed her for up to 25 minutes from your right breast. Then feed her for up to 25 minutes from your left breast. After this feed, put your baby down somewhere comfortable and safe, so if she feels like having a little nap before her bath she may. But don’t put her in bed as she may choose not to sleep. 5.20 pm Bath baby, or give top-to-toe wash. 6 pm Feed your baby for up to 25 minutes from your left breast. Then feed her for up to 25 minutes from your right breast. Or you or another carer could give her a bottle of expressed milk. If you don’t breastfeed your baby at the 6 pm feed during the first week of the routine while establishing breastfeeding, you should express 30 ml from each breast at 8 pm instead of the suggested time of 9 pm. 7 pm Swaddle your baby and put her in bed on her back awake and allow her to self-settle. 9 pm Express as much as you can, up to 90 ml, from your right breast. 9.30 pm Wake your baby up and feed her for up to 25 minutes from your left breast. Then feed her for up to fifteen minutes from your right breast. Night feeds Set your alarm clock for 2.30 am every night: in case your baby has not woken for a feed it is very important you don’t go more than five hours without feeding your baby on this routine. But if your baby woke, for example, at 12.30 am, then reset your alarm clock for 5.30 am. If she woke any time after 1.35 am and fed, however, reset your alarm for just before 6.40 am, so you can get up and express. If your baby wakes at 6.30 am, or while you are expressing, and is crying you should feed her. If your baby seems content to wait then you should try to express first and feed her as near to 7 am as possible. However, if you feed her first you should express after the feed. During night feeds, try not to talk to your baby and keep the lights dim so your baby starts to understand the difference between night and day. Important note: By two weeks old your baby should be back to her original birth weight. If your baby has regained her birth weight and is over 3 kg, you may advance to the two-to four-week routine. If your baby has not regained her birth weight or is still under 3 kg, please stay on the above routine until she has reached these goals. When you do advance to the next routine, follow each routine for two weeks until you reach the ten-week routine. Then your next move of routine will be when your baby starts on solids. Tip: If you find your baby is too sleepy after a bath to take a good feed try feeding her on one breast before the bath and the other side after the bath.

LOVE AND LOGIC TIP 8 What They See Is What They Learn I (Jim) spent my childhood on the wrong side of the tracks in a trailer in industrial Denver. When my family scraped enough money together, we bought a little garage to live in while my dad built a house on the property.              Dad worked a morning shift downtown and rode the streetcar to work, and then when he returned at 2:00 p.m. every day, he picked up his hammer and saw and built a house. It took seven years. As I watched him work, I thought, Wow! He gets to do all the fun stuff: mix the concrete, lay the bricks, put on the shingles, hammer nails, saw wood. I watched it all day, every day.              At the end of the day, when my dad knocked off, he invariably said, “Jim, clean up this mess.” So I would roll out the wheelbarrow, pick up a shovel and a rake, and clean up the mess. At the same time, Dad would explain to me that people have to learn to clean up after themselves. They need to finish and put the tools away.              When my dad noticed that I left my own stuff lying around, he complained, “Why don’t you ever pick up your stuff, Jim? There’s your bike on the sidewalk, and your tools are all over the place. When you go to look for a tool, you won’t know where it is.” I, of course, was learning all about cleaning up. I was learning that adults don’t clean up after themselves.              Had my father modeled cleaning up after himself — saying in the process, “I feel good now that the day’s work is finished, but I’ll feel better when I clean up this mess and put all the tools in the right places” — he would have developed a son who liked to clean up his own messes. As it is, my garage is a mess to this very day.

My evil laugh slipped out real quick. It felt good. 4:46pm Steve just asked me if I heard a donkey. Note to self: Evil laugh still needs major improvements.

Behavioral questions tend to fall into one of five areas, so you’ll want to make sure that you have good coverage of these topics across your five key stories. These common topics are: Leadership & Influence Challenges Mistakes / failures Successes Teamwork You should have at least one story per topic. Ideally, several of your stories will fall under two or more categories.

TCU Florist, Fort Worth is a local florist with same-day delivery services and creative floral design in Texas. We are open Monday-Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., and Saturdays from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. With over 70 years in the floral industry, we are equipped to give you the most stunning arrangements for your every need. We recognize that flowers can reveal a thousand emotions when words fail. We feel there's no better way to convey a message than with nature's flowers and plants. That's why our team of floral artists dedicate all their talents and efforts towards putting together the most amazing bouquets for all your needs! We offer impressive floral products with a wide range of fresh flowers and exquisite styles! We carry all your best-loved blooms: roses, lilies, tulips, sunflowers, carnations, gerbera daisies, and many more. We specialize in high-style floral arrangements that show off the beauty of these blooms. Our team of floral artists can make the perfect bouquet of your dreams, whether it's traditional or modern, whether it's a luxurious arrangement or a charming gift basket. Want something more one-of-a-kind? We also have a wide collection of green plants, tropicals, dish gardens, and baskets of fresh goods. Let us help you find the most ideal flower bouquet that suits your style! Go to our website or stop by our flower shop to find your favorite designs. If you want something tailor-made, we're here to help! Talk to our friendly team of florists about your needs. They'll be more than happy to help you create the ideal bouquet that suits your style. At TCU Florist, we promise you'll get only the highest quality arrangements for each and every order! Timeless rose bouquet for your anniversary? Extravagant arrangement bursting with pink, white, and red colors for a special event? Heartfelt bouquet for your mother to express your love and appreciation? Thoughtful sympathy gift basket to send your thoughts and prayers? We make sure you'll get exactly what you need every single time. We offer local express and same-day delivery to churches, hospitals, funeral homes, and cemeteries. Our drivers are well equipped to deliver your flowers on schedule and without hassle. Ready to place your order? Need more information? Call us at (817) 924-2211 or email us at tcuflorist@yahoo.com.

Hopefully, once they’d spoken to Grace, she’d have more to ask and the calls would necessitate themselves.  Roper turned into the street with the shelter on it and pulled the handbrake up without pressing the button. It clicked angrily and Jamie resisted the urge to tell him that it wasn’t good for the car. They got out and she breathed through her nose again.  The air was marginally fresher.  Her watch told her it was half past twelve and the smell of soup coming out of the shelter, as well as the growing line of homeless people, told her that it was nearly lunchtime.  The door was closed and another piece of paper had been stuck over the last one. It read ‘Hot food for all. 1pm.’  The people outside were lined up neatly, hugging the right-hand rail and stretching down onto the pavement and along the street. Jamie did a quick headcount down and got to twenty-two before Roper moved in front of her and she lost the number.  He looked back, dipped his head towards the door, and she went after him.  A guy with a shaggy beard and a lined face wearing two coats opened his mouth to tell them there was a line, and then had his sixth-sense tweaked and clammed up.  Roper gave him a glance and then pulled the door open and headed inside.  The room was much the same as it was before — except it was now empty of bodies and a dozen or so folding chairs had been set out for people to sit and eat. The camp table at the back that the coffee still had been on was now mostly filled by a big soup heater. It looked like it was older than Jamie was and the caked droplets of a thousand broths stained the side.

You can refine it later, but the only way to shut out all the unnecessary doubts in your head is to impose a deadline, and five-thirty p.m. is as good a time as any.

Stay Hydrated Check this box if your urine never appeared darker than a pale yellow all day. Note that if you’re eating riboflavin-fortified foods (such as nutritional yeast), then base this instead on getting nine cups of unsweetened beverages a day for women (which would be taken care of by the green tea and water preloading recommendations) or thirteen cups a day for men. If you have heart or kidney issues, don’t increase fluid intake at all without first talking with your physician. Remember, diet soda may be calorie-free, but it’s not consequence-free, as we learned in the Low in Added Sugar section. Deflour Your Diet Check this box every day your whole grain servings are in the form of intact grains. The powdering of even 100 percent whole grains robs our microbiomes of the starch that would otherwise be ferried down to our colons encapsulated in unbroken cell walls. Front-Load Your Calories There are metabolic benefits to distributing more calories to earlier in the day, so make breakfast (ideally) or lunch your largest meal of the day in true king/prince/pauper style. Time-Restrict Your Eating Confine eating to a daily window of time of your choosing under twelve hours in length that you can stick to consistently, seven days a week. Given the circadian benefits of reducing evening food intake, the window should end before 7:00 p.m. Optimize Exercise Timing The Daily Dozen’s recommendation for optimum exercise duration for longevity is ninety minutes of moderately intense activity a day, which is also the optimum exercise duration for weight loss. Anytime is good, and the more the better, but there may be an advantage to exercising in a fasted state, at least six hours after your last meal. Typically, this would mean before breakfast, but if you timed it right, you could exercise midday before a late lunch or, if lunch is eaten early enough, before dinner. This is the timing for nondiabetics. Diabetics and prediabetics should instead start exercising thirty minutes after the start of a meal and ideally go for at least an hour to completely straddle the blood sugar peak. If you had to choose a single meal to exercise after, it would be dinner, due to the circadian rhythm of blood sugar control that wanes throughout the day. Ideally, though, breakfast would be the largest meal of the day, and you’d exercise after that—or, even better, after every meal. Weigh Yourself Twice a Day Regular self-weighing is considered crucial for long-term weight control, but there is insufficient evidence to support a specific frequency of weighing. My recommendation is based on the one study that found that twice daily—upon waking and right before bed—appeared superior to once a day (about six versus two pounds of weight loss over twelve weeks).

you hit your deepest sleep cycle at about two a.m., that your body temperature is lowest at about four a.m. Your body’s sharpest rise of blood pressure comes at about six forty-five a.m., and a bowel movement is most likely at eight thirty in the morning. By ten in the morning, your mental alertness peaks, and your digestion is operating most efficiently at noon. Your coordination, reaction time, and cardiovascular strength peak in the afternoon while your digestion powers down. After sunset, your blood pressure hits its highest daily level, along with your body’s temperature. At about nine p.m., your brain starts releasing melatonin, and your digestion slows to half speed. By ten thirty, your bowel movements are suppressed, and your digestion is at a crawl. This happens, or should happen, every day.

I’m on my feet all day at work, so by 5:00 p.m. my lower back is usually aching. I wore XYZ shoes for the first time, and by 5:00 p.m. I felt like I could do another shift without blinking. I haven’t felt this good in ten years.

I felt like I had no more stories, no more speeches, and no more “rah-rah” in me. I decided to level with the team and see what happened. I called an all engineering meeting and gave the following speech: “I have some bad news. We are getting our asses kicked by BladeLogic and it’s a product problem. If this continues, I am going to have to sell the company for cheap. There is no way for us to survive if we don’t have the winning product. So, I am going to need every one of you to do something. I need you to go home tonight and have a serious conversation with your wife, husband, significant other, or whoever cares most about you and tell them, ‘Ben needs me for the next six months.’ I need you to come in early and stay late. I will buy you dinner, and I will stay here with you. Make no mistake, we have one bullet left in the gun and we must hit the target.” At the time, I felt horrible asking the team to make yet another big sacrifice. Amazingly, I found out while writing this book that I probably should have felt good about it. Here’s what Ted Crossman, one of my best engineers, said about that time and the launch of the aptly named Darwin Project many years later: Of all the times I think of at Loudcloud and Opsware, the Darwin Project was the most fun and the most hard. I worked seven days a week 8 a.m.–10 p.m. for six months straight. It was full on. Once a week I had a date night with my wife where I gave her my undivided attention from 6 p.m. until midnight. And the next day, even if it was Saturday, I’d be back in the office at 8 a.m. and stay through dinner. I would come home between 10–11 p.m. Every night. And it wasn’t just me. It was everybody in the office. The technical things asked of us were great. We had to brainstorm how to do things and translate those things into an actual product. It was hard, but fun. I don’t remember losing anyone during that time. It was like, “Hey, we gotta get this done, or we will not be here, we’ll have to get another job.” It was a tight-knit group of people. A lot of the really junior people really stepped up. It was a great growing experience for them to be thrown into the middle of the ocean and told, “Okay, swim.” Six months later we suddenly started winning proofs of concepts we hadn’t before. Ben did a great job, he’d give us feedback, and pat people on the back when we were done.

Burgling your way out of yourself, quietly, subtly, slipping away from yourself as light slips away from a room when night falls (though night does not fall; objects secrete it at the end of the day when, in their tiredness, they exile themselves in their silence). Grey, still day, like a perpetual dawn. The birds themselves were deceived by it. They went on singing all day, even though daybreak never came. It is Sunday 13 May, 6 p.m. Is this a good or a bad thing? As evening comes on, a cold silent wind gets up. All we need is a heat storm to put the finishing touch to the unreality of the season. And yet the birds are singing and men are thinking, on this Sunday, in secret. They are warding off the absence of sun and the monotony of Sunday. They are dreaming of the marriage of sun and sand. They are dreaming of fogging up the mirrors and each shining forth in his own madness. They are listening to a piece of baroque music: 'Whence comes, whence comes such a loneliness?

12:40 p.m.: start making the plan. Remember when you could be roused from a night being spent on the couch in your pajamas, curled around a pint of Chubby Hubby, and goaded into joining your friends at the bar even though you’d already taken off your bra? Yeah, I can’t either, but I know those days existed. I have the liver damage to prove it. Now when I go out I have to start gearing up for that shit at least three days in advance, and if I’m actually going to go through with it, it has to include both an ironclad reservation and a reliable seating arrangement. Showing up at a restaurant and hoping for the best is a young person’s game. If I’m going out, I need to know that there is a table with my name on it and a comfortable seat pulled up to it. I’m too old to hover anxiously near the door, sweating under my coat in my good outside clothes, watching people who actually planned ahead be ushered to their awaiting tables and served the foods I am dying to eat. I’m not that organized, though, so I spend a long time scrolling through OpenTable to try to find a reservation for 7 p.m. at a place that has more than a few high-tops left and won’t attempt to put us outside. It’s slim pickings.

Good. So go and make your dal, sabzi, roti fresh and use a small utensil. That way you will save your fuel and LPG cost. Okay? Also, understand the reason why you’ve got dimples (cellulite) in the wrong places. You didn’t just get fat over the last few years because of excessive calories or limited exercise. It’s about fuel efficiency. You’ve consumed too many calories and received very little nutrients in return, forcing such a deprived state in your body that the body fat is also turning toxic, and instead of evenly spreading out under your skin, it has developed stretch marks, cellulite and khaddas. It’s like using a ten-person ka capacity wala kadai and making only one person’s sabzi in it. Waste hua na? So much time and fuel to heat the kadai aur mila kya? Sabzi (and that too overcooked) only for one person. Getting it?’ ‘Kind of.’ ‘So that’s why I’m telling you to eat a wholesome meal — roti, sabzi, dal — by 6-6.30 p.m., when all you eat is junk. Every calorie you eat will be worth the nutrients.’ ‘This variety is all junk or what? Even if I make it at home?’ ‘You really need me to answer that? Yes, Hinaben, make it more than once, max twice a week, and it’s junk. Too little nutrients too many calories. One person’s sabzi in a ten-people ka kadai.’ ‘Okay, can I eat moong dhokli? I’ll eat it with sabzi separate. It’s like dal dhokli. So the roti I will mix in moong ka dal. My mother-in-law loves it and so does my son. So

I too have read his version of the facts. Like you and millions of others. And everyone got the picture, right from the start: He had a man’s name; my brother had the name of an incident. He could have called him “Two P.M.,” like that other writer who called his black man “Friday.” An hour of the day instead of a day of the week. Two in the afternoon, that’s good. Zujj in Algerian Arabic, two, the pair, him and me, the unlikeliest twins, somehow, for those who know the story of the story. A brief Arab, technically ephemeral, who lived for two hours and has died incessantly for seventy years, long after his funeral. It’s like my brother Zujj has been kept under glass. And even though he was a murder victim, he’s always given some vague designation, complete with reference to the two hands of a clock, over and over again, so that he replays his own death, killed by a bullet fired by a Frenchman who just didn’t know what to do with his day and with the rest of the world, which he carried on his back.

Briar Patch women would face, lives were at risk, and the pursuit of justice would have to come first. She finished her drink and glanced at the clock. ‘God! Is that the time? I must get home. Thanks for the drink, and thanks for helping me, Spooks. I appreciate it. Now I have to go. Don’t forget to put your candle back in the window.’ CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE With a showman’s flourish, Rory burst into the office and deposited a pile of folders and reports on Nikki’s desk. ‘Results, Nikki! Incontrovertible. Listen to this. Millicent Cartwright’s dental records match those of Ellen McDonald from Dunedin, South Island. Same woman. And your nice new detective, Ben, is it, has a fairly recent photograph of her, sent by the New Zealand police. Same face as the cadaver in my mortuary.’ Rory took the coffee Joseph handed him. ‘Now, how she died.’ He paused. ‘In exactly the same manner as Louise Lawson. There’s a head injury, not enough to kill her, but enough to knock her out, and she had almost identical lacerations on her arms, wrists, neck and thighs. There is no doubt that she died from a massive loss of blood.’ ‘And as Millicent Cartwright is connected to the Hammond case and Louise to the Prospero case, we have our connection!’ Nikki felt a surge of elation. It was a single killer. ‘Ah, now hold on, dear Detective Inspector, the good professor has yet to finish.’ Nikki looked at Rory. ‘Go on, and don’t make it bad news, please.’ ‘Far from it. Listen to this. I was having a brief discussion with one of my colleagues who conducted the PM on your suicide case, George Ackroyd. We were just admiring the excellent job he did on crushing the hyoid bone in his throat, when I noticed something.’ He took a slow sip of coffee. ‘It’s fortuitous that I have such a good eye for colour because there it was, Midnight Orchid! On his left cheek! Just the tiniest dab, but I got a match!’ Nikki stared at him. ‘So Louise’s last visitor also kissed George?’ ‘Well, that brand of lipstick is not exactly rare. But it would seem so.’ ‘Then did he actually kill himself? Or was it made to look that way?’ ‘It was suicide, without a doubt. Everything about the crime scene indicates that he was alone when he died, and my findings discount any outside interference. It’s what, or who, drove him to it that you need to prove.’ ‘Avril Hammond.

I’m taking a shower,” he announces, not sparing me a glance as he moves past me and into the bathroom. This is way above my pay grade. I don’t possess the necessary training to make sense of this behavior. Twenty minutes later, I’m tucked into the cozy bed, reading glasses on, Delia’s latest manuscript on Dane’s iPad when he steps out of the bathroom. Aaaand I instantly turn into Joan of Arc, burned at the stake. Except the heat doesn’t start at my feet. Noooo. It starts between my legs and spreads forth. By the time it reaches my face, there’s a veil of sweat above my lips. Not attractive. A wall of finely sculpted flesh walks further into the room with only a scrap of towel to hide the extra good parts. There’s so much razzle dazzle to take in my mind locks onto one area. His abdominal muscles. Mother of gee oh dee, what kind of torture must one endure to get those? So cut they don’t even look real. Mentally, I’m poking them with my index finger to see if they poke back. Until something intrudes in the periphery of my vision. South of these spectacular ab muscles, the towel wrapped around his waist starts to rise. That’s when I hear a snapping of fingers. A large hand immediately comes into view and more snapping of fingers. “Eyes up, Shorty. Or you’ll get more of a show than you bargained for.” My gaze makes a swift trip back up to his face. His mouth is twisted in a grimace and his eyebrow arched. He’s not happy I was looking…whatever. “Don’t look so scared. I pinky promise not to molest you.” His eyes widen while his lips thin. “You know what, it’s still early. I’m gonna get a workout in. I’ll be back later.” A workout? At 9 p.m.? He doesn’t even wait for me to respond. He grabs his clothes in a hurry, and a moment later he’s gone. I know I don’t have a ton of experience with men but this can’t be normal behavior. This has got to be far from normal behavior.

Most Italians consume alcohol every day, but it’s not what we call drinking. For Americans and northern Europeans alcoholic beverages are mind-altering drugs, used as tranquilizers, sleeping potions, inhibition-looseners (“Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker”—Ogden Nash), or roads to inebriation. That is to say, to getting tipsy, high, drunk, plastered, smashed, sloshed, sozzled, soused, crocked, wrecked, juiced, stinko, tight, pie-eyed, crosseyed, shit-faced, blitzed, fried, wasted, gassed, polluted, pissed, tanked up, ripped, loaded, pickled, bombed, blasted, blooey, blotto, blind drunk, roaring drunk, dead drunk, falling down drunk, drunk as a lord, stewed to the gills, or feeling no pain—and that’s just my own personal vocabulary. Italians reach that state so infrequently that their language provides only a few tame options—ubriaco (drunk), brillo (tipsy), alticcio (high), sbronzo (drunk)—with at most perso (lost) or fradicio (rotten) tacked on for a touch of color. They don’t even have a proper word for a hangover, though if pressed they’ll come up with the stately postumi della sbornia, aftereffects of overindulgence. For Italians, wine and beer are foods. If they provide a little buzz that’s just a pleasant side benefit, improving the sparkle of the conversation. When I first traveled in Italy, parents regularly fed wine-laced water to their kids (“acquavino”), vaccinating them against later dipsomania. And at lunchtime in the cafeteria of my Nuovo Regina Margherita Hospital the docs would jostle to sit at the chaplain’s table, because he’d always bring a bottle of good country wine. Even the harder stuff fits into a culinary protocol: a seven p.m. Campari is meant to whet the appetite, and the cognac or amaro at the end of a large meal to aid digestion. Which is why, in proportion, Italy has one-tenth as many problem drinkers as America.

I set out for my first overnight training hike that I have been on since I was on the PCT in May, 2016. Starting at the Roby Lake, Missouri area, I made my way down an unfamiliar trail, with an intentionally overloaded pack. Two tents, two sleeping bags, and just about every piece of gear and trail clothing I own. I didn’t bother to weigh the pack, but it was the heaviest I have ever carried. Some distance into the trail I found a trail register – I stopped to register and was curious to see if I might come across any kindred souls. Nope, not a soul on the trail register for the past 12 days, I would very likely be totally alone. The trail meandered uphill and down, by ponds, and eventually to a nice creek with a small waterfall. Along the way I came to a pine grove atop a ridge and what a mess that was – we recently had freezing rain here in Missouri and it looks like it took out several dozen along the trail – they literally look like they just exploded – with the trail being impassable for about ¼ mile – resulting in some bushwhacking and hopefully me not getting lost. Unlike the PCT where I have Halfmile, Guthooks, and other apps that can tell you that you are 400’ west of the trail, and which direction you need to go to get back on trail, here you just need to pay more attention. When finally done tramping around the blow downs I continued down the trail, and back up on top of another ridge and into some pines. I set up camp about 4:30 PM which would usually be early, but it was dark, cloudy and wet – I wanted to find a decent campsite and took the 2nd one that I thought looked nice. As I set up camp I found I was just above a nice running creek, which made for a nice setting. There was no rain in the forecast but heavy fog came in, which collected on the trees and might as well have been rain. Of course I packed everything, except my rain fly it turned out. Yes I had another tent, but that is my PCT tent and I am not going to chance damaging it before I even get there. I decide it’s not too bad, occasional drips would splatter through the netting but all would be well – and I did have my bivy sack so I put my sleeping bag in there, inside the tent, and made sure most things were covered. There were signs of bear throughout, and I could not locate my paracord rope for hanging my food, so I put the food in my pack, put the pack a ways up a tree, and strapped it on to hope for the best. I had a time getting a campfire going, with everything being wet, but eventually enjoyed a nice campfire until bed time. Unlike being on the PCT where you never really feel alone because there are so many other hikers out there, I knew I was truly alone out here, there were no other footprints in the mud – see the pictures of the trail/river – and this was a bit unusual, really feeling alone and way out there. I enjoyed that. It was one of those nights when every noise piques your curiosity, and every drop falling from the trees landing in leaves sounds like a footstep of some kind – I did hear some animal grunt, possibly a ferel hog, bear, or deer even – couldn’t really tell. Nothing bothered my pack, and all was well in the morning – but much of my gear was wet. I set off back down to the trail head, surprised at how little muscle or back pain I was in considering the workout provided by the trail and the heavy weight I was carrying. I would feel it a bit later however, but that’s a good thing, that’s why I am training – trying to get some sense of trail legs before I hit the PCT exactly 60 days from now! I received my permission to enter Canada, I have my plane tickets, and in 3 more days I will apply for and get my PCT permit for March 21, 2017 – time is flying by… Morgan

the Swedes know how to live on a long voyage. The routine was as follows: Breakfast at eight-thirty. Walk the deck, rest in deck chairs, and read until 1 p.m., when luncheon was served. Then sleep and get fat until 4 p.m., when tea was served. At four-thirty promptly we had a Swedish bath, a massage, exercise in the gymnasium, followed by a swim in an ice-cold pool. This enabled us to lose the fat we gained during the day and put us in good form to regain the fat at dinner, after which there was an excellent concert and dancing until 11 p.m.