Locked Up Series Quotes

Of course, it is quite possible to be in the dark in the dark, but there are so many secrets in the world that it is likely that you are always in the dark about one thing or another, whether you are in the dark in the dark or in the dark not in the dark, although the sun can go down so quickly that you may be in the in the dark about being in the dark, only to look around and find yourself no longer in the dark about being in the dark, but in the dark in the dark nontheless, not only because of the dark, but because of the ballerinas in the dark, who are not in the dark about the dark, but also not in the dark about the locked cabinet, and you may be in the dark about the ballerinas digging up the locked cabinet in the dark, even though you are no longer in the dark about being in the dark, and so you are in fact in the dark about being in the dark, even though you are not in the dark about being in the dark, and so you may fall into the hole that the ballerinas have dug, which is dark, in the dark, and in the park.

Velvet looks horrified. “If you are fool enough to address King R’jan, you will do it thus and in no other manner! ‘My King, Liege, Lord, and Master, your servant begs you grant it leave to speak.’” “Wow. Totally delusionary there.” “Good luck with that,” Ryodan says. “She doesn't beg to speak, or do anything else. You can lock her up, down, and sideways and it’s never going to happen.” I beam at him. I had no idea he thought so highly of me.

The phrase "in the dark," as I'm sure you know, can refer not only to one's shadowy surroundings, but also to the shadowy secrets of which one might be unaware. Every day, the sun goes down over all these secrets, and so everyone is in the dark in one way or another. If you are sunbathing in a park, for instance, but you do not know that a locked cabinet is buried fifty feet beneath your blanket, then you are in the dark even though you are not actually in the dark, whereas if you are on a midnight hike, knowing full well that several ballerinas are following close behind you, then you are not in the dark even if you are in fact in the dark. Of course, it is quite possible to be in the dark in the dark, as well as to be not in the dark not in the dark, but there are so many secrets in the world that it is likely that you are always in the dark about one thing or another, whether you are in the dark in the dark or in the dark not in the dark, although the sun can go down so quickly that you may be in the dark about being in the dark in the dark, only to look around and find yourself no longer in the dark about being in the dark in the dark, but in the dark in the dark nonetheless, not only because of the dark, but because of the ballerinas in the dark, who are not in the dark about the dark, but also not in the dark about the locked cabinet, and you may be in the dark about the ballerinas digging up the locked cabinet in the dark, even though you are no longer in the dark about being in the dark, and so you are in fact in the dark about being in the dark, even though you are not in the dark about being in the dark, and so you may fall into the hole that the ballerinas have dug, which is dark, in the dark, and in the park.

Something woke me up. My hand instinctively reached for my gun, and I sat up. It sounded like someone was trying to push the door open. But how could that be? There was a secure lock and chain hook which all hotel room doors have. My breathing slowed while my heart raced.

I feel moderately bad about this whole thing. On the one hand, I am providing myself with urgently required survival skills. Other lessons in this series include Shoplifting, Beating People Up, Picking Locks, Climbing Trees, Driving, Housebreaking, Dumpster Diving, and How to Use Oddball Things like Venetian Blinds and Garbage Can Lids as Weapons. On the other hand, I’m corrupting my poor innocent little self. I sigh. Somebody’s got to do it.

She was shaking so badly that she tucked her hands into her pockets and clamped her lips together to lock up the words. But they danced in her skull anyway, around and around. You should have gotten Dorian and Sorscha out the day the king butchered those slaves. Did you learn nothing from Nehemia's death? Did you somehow think you could win with your honor intact, without sacrificing something? You shouldn't have left him; how could you let him face the king alone? How could you, how could you, how could you?

If you were going to give a gold medal to Count Olaf, you would have to lock it up someplace before the awarding ceremony, because Count Olaf was such a greedy and evil man that he would try to steal it beforehand.

There have been only five burglars in the history of robbery who have specialized in rope. All five of these burglars were caught and sent to prison, which is why scarcely any people lock up their rope for safekeeping.

I confess that if I were in Violet's place, with only a few minutes to open a locked suitcase, instead of on the deck of my friend Bela's yacht, writing this down, I probably would have given up hope. I would have sunk to the floor of the bedroom and pounded my fists against the carpet wondering why in the world life was so unfair and filled with inconveniences.

For instance, if you woke up in the middle of the night and saw a masked woman trying to crawl through your bedroom window, you might call your mother or father to help you push her back out. If you found yourself hopelessly lost in the middle of a strange city, you might ask the police to give you a ride home. And if you were an author locked in an Italian restaurant that was slowly filling up with water, you might call upon your acquaintances in the locksmith, pasta, and sponge business to come and rescue you.

[[ ]] The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip. The body count climbs through a series of globewars. Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases. Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace. By the time soft-engineering slithers out of its box into yours, human security is lurching into crisis. Cloning, lateral genodata transfer, transversal replication, and cyberotics, flood in amongst a relapse onto bacterial sex. Neo-China arrives from the future. Hypersynthetic drugs click into digital voodoo. Retro-disease. Nanospasm.

On her head perched a pillbox hat with an absurd little veil. She'd pulled the dotted veil up out of her eyes, but not completely - it hung lopsidedly, dangling over her right brow. Her dark brown dress was filmed with dust she'd raised, and dust caught on her damp cheeks. One lock of hair had escaped her coiffure, a red snake dancing down her bodice. She was delightfully mussed, and dear God, he wanted her.

If you are like most people, you have an assortment of friends and family you can call upon in times of trouble. For instance, if you woke up in the middle of the night and saw a masked woman trying to crawl through your bedroom window, you might call your mother or father to help you push her back out. If you found yourself hopelessly lost in the middle of a strange city, you might ask the police to give you a ride home. And if you were an author locked in an Italian restaurant that was slowly filling up with water, you might call upon your acquaintances in the locksmith, pasta, and sponge business to come and rescue you.

There are doubtless those who would wish to lock up all those who suspected of terrorist and other serious offences and, in the time-honored phrase, throw away the key. But a suspect is by definition a person whom no offence has been proved. Suspicions, even if reasonably entertained, may prove to be misplaced, as a series of tragic miscarriages of justice has demonstrated. Police officers and security officials can be wrong. It is a gross injustice to deprive of his liberty for significant periods a person who has committed no crime and does not intend to do so. No civilized country should willingly tolerate such injustices.

Here’s how you practice shrieking like an insane woman who has been locked in an attic for a great many years: You stand in the middle of the field. You look around to be sure that no one is going to hear you. You breathe in a couple of times to get as much air in your chest as you can. You stretch your neck up like the Great Esquimaux Curlew. You imagine that it’s Game Seven of the World Series and it’s the bottom of the ninth and Joe Pepitone is rounding third base and the throw is coming in and the catcher has his glove up waiting for the ball and Joe Pepitone is probably going to be out and the game will be over and the Yankees will lose. Then you let out your shriek, because that’s how everyone in Yankee Stadium would be shrieking right then. That’s how you practice shrieking like an insane woman who has been locked in an attic for a great many years. And you keep doing it over and over again until all the birds in Marysville have flown away.

But in dozens and dozens of studies, Latham and Locke found that setting goals increased performance and productivity 11 to 25 percent.5 That’s quite a boost. If an eight-hour day is our baseline, that’s like getting two extra hours of work simply by building a mental frame (aka a goal) around the activity. But not every goal is the same. “We found that if you want the largest increase in motivation and productivity,” says Latham, “then big goals lead to the best outcomes. Big goals significantly outperform small goals, medium-sized goals, and vague goals. It comes down to attention and persistence—which are two of the most important factors in determining performance. Big goals help focus attention, and they make us more persistent. The result is we’re much more effective when we work, and much more willing to get up and try again when we fail.

I confess that if I were in Violet’s place, with only a few minutes to open a locked suitcase, instead of on the deck of my friend Bela’s yacht, writing this down, I probably would have given up hope. I would have sunk to the floor of the bedroom and pounded my fists against the carpet wondering why in the world life was so unfair and filled with inconveniences.

With an incredulous sigh, I found myself still shaking my head. It all seemed so improbable but I knew he was right. That was the most frustrating part of it all. I knew about the bunyip. How many times had I heard the word as a child? I even knew that they liked still water, quiet billabongs. But if I walked into the Rangers office at Central Station and told them they had a bunyip in their lake! Once more I shook my head. They wouldn’t even bother to lock me up. They would probably take the report and then just file it somewhere... like in the bin, like I was a nutter.

I began keeping diaries after they locked Rosemary up at Butler and I went to live with Aunt Elaine in Cranston until I was eighteen, but even the diaries can't be trusted. For instance, there's a series of entries describing a trip to New Brunswick that I'm pretty sure I never took. It used to scare me, those recollections of things that never took place, but I've gotten used to it.

A major defining factor was my wanting him to be part of the DC Universe. Because if someone as powerful as the Sandman was running all the dreams in the world, a natural question would be “Why haven’t we heard about him by now?” The answer I came up with was “He’s been locked away.” And that solution formed an image in my head of a naked man in a glass cell. My next question was “How long had he been trapped there?” The movie Awakenings hadn’t been made yet, but I’d read Oliver Sacks’s book a few months earlier, so I knew about the encephalitis lethargica, or “sleepy sickness,” that had swept Europe in 1916. Scientists to this day don’t understand what caused it, and I loved the idea of blaming it on the Sandman’s imprisonment, so I determined the length of his stay to be seventy-two years—ending in late 1988, when the series debuted. And so on; each plot point just seemed to naturally lead to the next one.

You have that look on your face,” Alessandro said, smiling as he tucked a damp lock of her blonde hair behind her ear. “What look?” Bree asked, resting a hand on his flushed chest, propping herself up on one elbow. She could feel the racing heart beneath. “The look of a woman who’s been rather well fucked, darling,” he grinned smugly. She punched his chest lightly. “Ego much?” “I see nothing wrong with taking pride in a job well done,” he pointed out. “Oh of course,” Bree said, laughing and dropped her head on his chest.

Don’t you routinely push yourself into absurd plot twists? Aren’t you often lured into someone else’s drama? It’s hard to resist getting hooked. You believe the premise of their story, whatever it is, and sign on to the madness. It happens. Kids use their amazing imaginations for fun. For them, it’s great to be in an imagined world and to believe in it completely. In the company of other excited kids, they can take a thrilling ride. But staying too long in a fantasy is exhausting, even for a child. After an afternoon of pretending, children are relieved to be called home for supper and to collapse into a warm bed. We adults, too, need to be called home to ourselves. Young or old, no one wants to be locked in a tower forever, however magical it might have seemed at first. I’m asking you to notice where you put your faith, and make changes when you need to. Common sense says to put your faith in you. Don’t lie to yourself for the sake of an idyllic notion. It’s not enough to admit to the fantasy, you need to wake yourself up. See where a bad story is taking you, and alter your course. Say no to the drama. Win the war over fear. Protect yourself from your own abuses, no one can do it for you.

While a 10x improvement is gargantuan, Teller has very specific reasons for aiming exactly that high. “You assume that going 10x bigger is going to be ten times harder,” he continues, “but often it’s literally easier to go bigger. Why should that be? It doesn’t feel intuitively right. But if you choose to make something 10 percent better, you are almost by definition signing up for the status quo—and trying to make it a little bit better. That means you start from the status quo, with all its existing assumptions, locked into the tools, technologies, and processes that you’re going to try to slightly improve. It means you’re putting yourself and your people into a smartness contest with everyone else in the world. Statistically, no matter the resources available, you’re not going to win. But if you sign up for moonshot thinking, if you sign up to make something 10x better, there is no chance of doing that with existing assumptions. You’re going to have to throw out the rule book. You’re going to have to perspective-shift and supplant all that smartness and resources with bravery and creativity.” This perspective shift is key. It encourages risk taking and enhances creativity while simultaneously guarding against the inevitable decline. Teller explains: “Even if you think you’re going to go ten times bigger, reality will eat into your 10x. It always does. There will be things that will be more expensive, some that are slower; others that you didn’t think were competitive will become competitive. If you shoot for 10x, you might only be at 2x by the time you’re done. But 2x is still amazing. On the other hand, if you only shoot for 2x [i.e., 200 percent], you’re only going to get 5 percent and it’s going to cost you the perspective shift that comes from aiming bigger.” Most critically here, this 10x strategy doesn’t hold true just for large corporations. “A start-up is simply a skunk works without the big company around it,” says Teller. “The upside is there’s no Borg to get sucked back into; the downside is you have no money. But that’s not a reason not to go after moonshots. I think the opposite is true. If you publicly state your big goal, if you vocally commit yourself to making more progress than is actually possible using normal methods, there’s no way back. In one fell swoop you’ve severed all ties between yourself and all the expert assumptions.” Thus entrepreneurs, by striving for truly huge goals, are tapping into the same creativity accelerant that Google uses to achieve such goals. That said, by itself, a willingness to take bigger risks

I wanted to kiss you. I can't explain why. I have no excuses. At any rate, don't worry. It was clearly a mistake, and I promise it won't happen agai-" Again. He kissed her again. Or rather, he kissed her for the first time- and he was so much better at it than she. This kiss could not be mistaken for an accidental collision mouths. Oh, no. He kissed with purpose. His lips had ideas. His tongue had plans. She closed her eyes and melted against him, flattening her hands on his muscled arms. He brushed his lips to hers in a series of chaste, yet masterful kisses. He swept a hand up her spine and into her hair, where he twisted and gathered the tangled locks in his fist. Then he tugged sharply, tipping her face to his and sending electric sensation over her every nerve. When her mouth fell open in a gasp, he reclaimed her lips, sweeping his tongue between them. Her first instinct was to shy away, but Penny fought against it. She reached higher, lacing her arms about his neck and holding tight. His tongue stroked hers, slow and insistent. He tasted of soot and salt and... and of apples, strangely. Tart, smoky, just a hint of sweet. A lush, decadent pleasure unwound within her, snaking through her veins- as though it had lain coiled in anticipation for years. Waiting on this moment. Waiting on this man.

The sun glanced off a long, wicked looking knife in the Comanche's grip. At least Cash wouldn't have long to mourn. The other Indians held similar weapons, but they hung back as their leader knelt next to Sullivan. He muttered something, low and guttural, a single syllable that sounded like an insult, then picked up a lock of Sullivan's hair. The knife descended toward his scalp. "No!" Reese shouted. "Me." The Comanche paused and stared at him with a spark of interest, almost admiration. But that couldn't be since the Indian had no idea what Reese was saying. He continued to try anyway. "Me first." He struggled, wishing he could use his hands to point at himself. "Shut the hell up, Reese," Sullivan said. "What possible difference does it make who they kill first?" "Who knows what might happen. While they're working on me, anyone could show up and save the rest of you." "In that case, me first," Cash drawled. "Me." "No. Yo primero!" "Kid, I'm the only one without a wife and far too many children. No one would miss me." "I would." The words were punctuated by the distinct sound of a rifle being cocked. All eyes turned toward the man who had appeared at the edge of the clearing. Cash's sigh of relief was in direct contrast to the sneer in his voice. "About damn time, Rev. We've been waitin' on you.

Lake Natron resided in northern Tanzania near an active volcano known as Ol Doinyo Lengai. It was part of the reason the lake had such unique characteristics. The mud had a curious dark grey color over where Jack had been set up for observation, and he noted that there was now an odd-looking mound of it to the right of one of the flamingo’s nests. He zoomed in further and further, peering at it, and then realized what he was actually seeing. The dragon had crouched down beside the nests and blended into the mud. From snout to tail, Jack calculated it had to be twelve to fourteen feet long. Its wings were folded against its back, which had small spines running down the length to a spiky tail. It had a fin with three prongs along the base of the skull and webbed feet tipped with sharp black talons. He estimated the dragon was about the size of a large hyena. It peered up at its prey with beady red eyes, its black forked tongue darting out every few seconds. Its shoulder muscles bunched and its hind legs tensed. Then it pounced. The dark grey dragon leapt onto one of flamingoes atop its nest and seized it by the throat. The bird squawked in distress and immediately beat its wings, trying to free itself. The others around them took to the skies in panic. The dragon slammed it into the mud and closed its jaws around the animal’s throat, blood spilling everywhere. The flamingo yelped out its last breaths and then finally stilled. The dragon dropped the limp carcass and sniffed the eggs before beginning to swallow them whole one at a time. “Holy shit,” Jack muttered. “Have we got a visual?” “Oh, yeah. Based on the size, the natives and the conservationists were right to be concerned. It can probably wipe out a serious number of wildlife in a short amount of time based on what I’m seeing. There’s only a handful of fauna that can survive in these conditions and it could make mincemeat out of them.” “Alright, so what’s the plan?” “They told me it’s very agile, which is why their attempts to capture it haven’t worked. I’m going to see if it responds to any of the usual stimuli. So far, they said it doesn’t appear to be aggressive.” “Copy that. Be careful, cowboy.” “Ten-four.” Jack glanced down at his utility belt and opened the pocket on his left side, withdrawing a thin silver whistle. He put it to his lips and blew for several seconds. Much like a dog whistle, Jack couldn’t hear anything. But the dragon’s head creaked around and those beady red eyes locked onto him. Jack lowered the whistle and licked his dry lips. “If I were in a movie, this would be the part where I said, ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this.’” The dragon roared, its grey wings extending out from its body, and then flew straight at him.

Through a series of connections, it was arranged for us to pick up boxes of documents detailing George Bush, Sr.’s Watchtower cocaine and heroin routes. Retired Brigadier General Russell Bowen was once an integral part of this operation. He worked directly under Bush until he turned whistleblower through his 1991 book The Immaculate Deception, The Bush Crime Family Exposed4. It was widely known that the Mexican and Caribbean drug ops I had worked under MK Ultra mind control tied directly in with Watchtower. These documents and evidences could prove invaluable to us since General Bowen was leaving the country in disgust and frustration with the lack of justice. Bush, Sr. had locked him up in a Federal Prison until he agreed to leave the country.

I, too, grew up in a place that could sometimes feel as limiting and final as being locked in an airtight closet, the air humid and rank with one’s own breath and panic. A place where for all the brilliant, sun-drenched summer days, there is sometimes only the absence of light: America, and the American South. A place where the old myths still hold a special place in many white hearts: the rebel flag, Confederate monuments, lovingly restored plantations, Gone with the Wind. A place where black people were bred and understood to be animals, a place where some feel that the Fourteenth Amendment and Brown v. Board of Education are only the more recent in a series of unfortunate events. A place where black life has been systematically devalued for hundreds of years.

The man in this stage of consciousness thinks of his "I" as a mental thing, having a lower companion, the body. He feels that he has advanced, but yet his "I" does not give him the answer to the riddles and questions that perplex him. And he becomes most unhappy. Such men often develop into Pessimists, and consider the whole of life as utterly evil and disappointing—a curse rather than a blessing. Pessimism belongs to this plane, for neither the Physical Plane man or the Spiritual Plane man have this curse of Pessimism. The former man has no such disquieting thoughts, for he is almost entirely absorbed in gratifying his animal nature, while the latter man recognizes his mind as an instrument of himself, rather than as himself, and knows it to be imperfect in its present stage of growth. He knows that he has in himself the key to all knowledge—locked up in the Ego—and which the trained mind, cultivated, developed and guided by the awakened Will, may grasp as it unfolds.

Well, it was a kind of back-to-front program. It’s funny how many of the best ideas are just an old idea back-to-front. You see there have already been several programs written that help you to arrive at decisions by properly ordering and analysing all the relevant facts so that they then point naturally towards the right decision. The drawback with these is that the decision which all the properly ordered and analysed facts point to is not necessarily the one you want.’ ‘Yeeeess...’ said Reg’s voice from the kitchen. ‘Well, Gordon’s great insight was to design a program which allowed you to specify in advance what decision you wished it to reach, and only then to give it all the facts. The program’s task, which it was able to accomplish with consummate ease, was simply to construct a plausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the conclusion. ‘And I have to say that it worked brilliantly. Gordon was able to buy himself a Porsche almost immediately despite being completely broke and a hopeless driver. Even his bank manager was unable to find fault with his reasoning. Even when Gordon wrote it off three weeks later.’ ‘Heavens. And did the program sell very well?’ ‘No. We never sold a single copy.’ ‘You astonish me. It sounds like a real winner to me.’ ‘It was,’ said Richard hesitantly. ‘The entire project was bought up, lock, stock and barrel, by the Pentagon. The deal put WayForward on a very sound financial foundation. Its moral foundation, on the other hand, is not something I would want to trust my weight to. I’ve recently been analysing a lot of the arguments put forward in favour of the Star Wars project, and if you know what you’re looking for, the pattern of the algorithms is very clear. ‘So much so, in fact, that looking at Pentagon policies over the last couple of years I think I can be fairly sure that the US Navy is using version 2.00 of the program, while the Air Force for some reason only has the beta-test version of 1.5. Odd, that.

swirl together and our breathing clashes, my hips are busy rubbing against his. My legs spread just about as wide as I can get, forcing my pussy to open like a flower and hug his dick tight. Pushing off his chest, I lift up, grab his dick, and slam myself home. I almost can’t hear the harsh bite of his breath over my scream. I feel the rings hitting a spot deep within me that will have me begging in no time. The one pressed tight against my clit has my vision going hazy. “Have . . . to . . . move,” he warns, and once again, I find myself rolled onto my back. He doesn’t even pause when he flips and pounds into me. His hips slap against mine, his balls make a loud, wet sound as they hit my skin, and his eyes flash something I wish to God I understood. “H-h-harder!” He slams deep and leans up on his knees causing his dick to slip out almost completely. His large hands grab my hips and bring my body half off the bed. With my head still on the bed, the rest of my body hovers under his control as he pulls back and gives me my wish. My legs are dead weight, my hands clench tightly in the sheets, and my eyes hold his. The look in his eyes combined with the hard hitting of his piercings, and the awe-inspiring thrusts is enough to have me screaming. Screaming, begging, and pleading. I have lost control of my body. It is locked tight and shattering into pieces. His hips pick up speed but then slightly slow down towards the end of my release. He brings my body back down to the mattress and rocks his hips, causing a few more aftershocks to roll through my body. “Do you like my cock? Do you like having me so deep in your body you won’t be able to walk tomorrow? The way your pussy is gripping my dick and your wetness is coating my balls, I would say you fucking love it.” I whimper and he smiles. This isn’t the attractive smile he gives the public, no . . . this smile is pure fucking sexy evil. “Going to fuck you raw.” He warns before making true to his words. When he finally grabs my hips and locks our pelvises together, I have come twice and lost track of reality.

I thought Dougal MacKenzie taught Jamie to fight left-handed,” I said. I rather wondered what Jenny thought of her uncle Dougal. She nodded, licking the end of a thread before putting it through the eye of her needle with one quick poke. “Aye, it was, but that was later, when Jamie was grown, and went to foster wi’ Dougal. It was Ian’s father taught him his first strokes.” She smiled, eyes on the shirt in her lap. “I remember, when they were young, auld John told Ian it was his job to stand to Jamie’s right, for he must guard his chief’s weaker side in a fight. And he did—they took it verra seriously, the two of them. And I suppose auld John was right, at that,” she added, snipping off the excess thread. “After a time, nobody would fight them, not even the MacNab lads. Jamie and Ian were both fair-sized, and bonny fighters, and when they stood shoulder to shoulder, there was no one could take the pair o’ them down, even if they were outnumbered.” She laughed suddenly, and smoothed back a lock of hair behind her ear. “Watch them sometime, when they’re walking the fields together. I dinna suppose they even realize they do it still, but they do. Jamie always moves to the left, so Ian can take up his place on the right, guardin’ the weak side.

Honest to God, I hadn’t meant to start a bar fight. “So. You’re the famous Jordan Amador.” The demon sitting in front of me looked like someone filled a pig bladder with rotten cottage cheese. He overflowed the bar stool with his gelatinous stomach, just barely contained by a white dress shirt and an oversized leather jacket. Acid-washed jeans clung to his stumpy legs and his boots were at least twice the size of mine. His beady black eyes started at my ankles and dragged upward, past my dark jeans, across my black turtleneck sweater, and over the grey duster around me that was two sizes too big. He finally met my gaze and snorted before continuing. “I was expecting something different. Certainly not a black girl. What’s with the name, girlie?” I shrugged. “My mother was a religious woman.” “Clearly,” the demon said, tucking a fat cigar in one corner of his mouth. He stood up and walked over to the pool table beside him where he and five of his lackeys had gathered. Each of them was over six feet tall and were all muscle where he was all fat. “I could start to examine the literary significance of your name, or I could ask what the hell you’re doing in my bar,” he said after knocking one of the balls into the left corner pocket. “Just here to ask a question, that’s all. I don’t want trouble.” Again, he snorted, but this time smoke shot from his nostrils, which made him look like an albino dragon. “My ass you don’t. This place is for fallen angels only, sweetheart. And we know your reputation.” I held up my hands in supplication. “Honest Abe. Just one question and I’m out of your hair forever.” My gaze lifted to the bald spot at the top of his head surrounded by peroxide blonde locks. “What’s left of it, anyway.” He glared at me. I smiled, batting my eyelashes. He tapped his fingers against the pool cue and then shrugged one shoulder. “Fine. What’s your question?” “Know anybody by the name of Matthias Gruber?” He didn’t even blink. “No.” “Ah. I see. Sorry to have wasted your time.” I turned around, walking back through the bar. I kept a quick, confident stride as I went, ignoring the whispers of the fallen angels in my wake. A couple called out to me, asking if I’d let them have a taste, but I didn’t spare them a glance. Instead, I headed to the ladies’ room. Thankfully, it was empty, so I whipped out my phone and dialed the first number in my Recent Call list. “Hey. He’s here. Yeah, I’m sure it’s him. They’re lousy liars when they’re drunk. Uh-huh. Okay, see you in five.” I hung up and let out a slow breath. Only a couple things left to do. I gathered my shoulder-length black hair into a high ponytail. I looped the loose curls around into a messy bun and made sure they wouldn’t tumble free if I shook my head too hard. I took the leather gloves in the pocket of my duster out and pulled them on. Then, I walked out of the bathroom and back to the front entrance. The coat-check girl gave me a second unfriendly look as I returned with my ticket stub to retrieve my things—three vials of holy water, a black rosary with the beads made of onyx and the cross made of wood, a Smith & Wesson .9mm Glock complete with a full magazine of blessed bullets and a silencer, and a worn out page of the Bible. I held out my hands for the items and she dropped them on the counter with an unapologetic, “Oops.” “Thanks,” I said with a roll of my eyes. I put the Glock back in the hip holster at my side and tucked the rest of the items in the pockets of my duster. The brunette demon crossed her arms under her hilariously oversized fake breasts and sent me a vicious sneer. “The door is that way, Seer. Don’t let it hit you on the way out.” I smiled back. “God bless you.” She let out an ugly hiss between her pearly white teeth. I blew her a kiss and walked out the door. The parking lot was packed outside now that it was half-past midnight. Demons thrived in darkness, so I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I’d been counting on it.

CHALLENGES TO YOUNG POETS Invent a new language anyone can understand. Climb the Statue of Liberty. Reach for the unattainable. Kiss the mirror and write what you see and hear. Dance with wolves and count the stars, including the unseen. Be naïve, innocent, non-cynical, as if you had just landed on earth (as indeed you have, as indeed we all have), astonished by what you have fallen upon. Write living newspaper. Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance level for hot air. Write and endless poem about your life on earth or elsewhere. Read between the lines of human discourse. Avoid the provincial, go for the universal. Think subjectively, write objectively. Think long thoughts in short sentences. Don't attend poetry workshops, but if you do, don't go the learn "how to" but to learn "what" (What's important to write about). Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces. Resist much, obey less. Secretly liberate any being you see in a cage. Write short poems in the voice of birds. Make your lyrics truly lyrical. Birdsong is not made by machines. Give your poem wings to fly to the treetops. The much-quoted dictum from William Carlos Williams, "No ideas but in things," is OK for prose, but it lays a dead hand on lyricism, since "things" are dead. Don't contemplate your navel in poetry and think the rest of the world is going to think it's important. Remember everything, forget nothing. Work on a frontier, if you can find one. Go to sea, or work near water, and paddle your own boat. Associate with thinking poets. They're hard to find. Cultivate dissidence and critical thinking. "First thought, best thought" may not make for the greatest poetry. First thought may be worst thought. What's on your mind? What do you have in mind? Open your mouth and stop mumbling. Don't be so open minded that your brains fall out. Questions everything and everyone. Be subversive, constantly questioning reality and status quo. Be a poet, not a huckster. Don't cater, don't pander, especially not to possible audiences, readers, editors, or publishers. Come out of your closet. It's dark there. Raise the blinds, throw open your shuttered windows, raise the roof, unscrew the locks from the doors, but don't throw away the screws. Be committed to something outside yourself. Be militant about it. Or ecstatic. To be a poet at sixteen is to be sixteen, to be a poet at 40 is to be a poet. Be both. Wake up and pee, the world's on fire. Have a nice day.

DANCING ANGELS During October 2001, the Lord began to speak to me about traveling to Newfoundland, Canada. I had no desire to go there, especially in the middle of the winter! At this time I was still concerned about my inability to “feel the Lord” and began to press into God all the more. At times I locked myself into the little house and fasted and prayed for up to seven days, or until the presence of God fell. After many confirmations in the spirit, I pooled all of my earthly wealth and made the trip to the great white North. The night before I was to depart, the Lord instructed me to “pray in tongues all the way to Newfoundland.” Somehow through the grace of God I succeeded in praying in the Spirit for about 18 hours until I touched down in Canada. In Springdale, Newfoundland, Canada, the Lord began instructing me to complete a series of prophetic actions. I attended an intercessory prayer meeting on Wednesday, November 21. We were interceding for an upcoming series of healing meetings. During this meeting, I began to “see” into the spirit. As the Lord opened my spiritual eyes, I incrementally saw the heavens open over Living Waters Ministries Church. In addition to this, I also began to hear angelic voices singing along with the worship team. At one point during the meeting, I saw a stream of golden oil pour out from Heaven and land on a certain spot in the sanctuary. At the leading of the Lord, I knelt upon that spot. The glory and anointing began to flow into and over my body. The sensation and anointing was very similar to what I experienced when the angel put his hands upon me the night of August 22, 2001. As I knelt under the spot where the golden oil was beginning to pour onto the altar, I was praying earnestly. I could feel the liquid oil raining down on my body. I could sense and smell this heavenly oil as it rolled off my head. The Holy Spirit began to talk to me in a very clear and direct way that I had never experienced before. I collapsed onto the carpet in a pool of golden oil and laid there in the anointing of the Holy Spirit. Then I sensed angels dancing all around the pool and me. I felt an angel as it brushed its wings across my face. I had a “knowing” that the angel was asking me to raise my hands into the air. When I raised my hands up to about two feet, the angel would push my hands back down with its strong, warm hands. I tried again, and when my hands were almost totally up, the angel tickled my nose with the feathers of its wings. I laughed, and my hands fell. The angel and I continued to interact in this fashion for nearly an hour. I did not actually see this angel, but the force and reality of its touch was very tangible. There was no doubt that I was interacting with a heavenly being. This experience was both refreshing and real. SEEING IS BELIEVING On Thursday, November 22, the healing meetings started; they would last through Sunday, the 25th. In these meetings God began to open my spiritual eyes beyond anything I could have ever imagined. On the first night of these meetings, I began to see an “open heaven” forming in the sanctuary. I could also hear and sense the activity of angels as the heavens continued to open up to a greater degree. On Friday, I began to see “bolts of light” shoot through the church, and again the stream of golden oil was flowing from the open heaven in a greater volume. On Saturday night during the worship service, I began to see feathers falling around the church and

All the many successes and extraordinary accomplishments of the Gemini still left NASA’s leadership in a quandary. The question voiced in various expressions cut to the heart of the problem: “How can we send men to the moon, no matter how well they fly their ships, if they’re pretty helpless when they get there? We’ve racked up rendezvous, docking, double-teaming the spacecraft, starting, stopping, and restarting engines; we’ve done all that. But these guys simply cannot work outside their ships without exhausting themselves and risking both their lives and their mission. We’ve got to come up with a solution, and quick!” One manned Gemini mission remained on the flight schedule. Veteran Jim Lovell would command the Gemini 12, and his space-walking pilot would be Buzz Aldrin, who built on the experience of the others to address all problems with incredible depth and finesse. He took along with him on his mission special devices like a wrist tether and a tether constructed in the same fashion as one that window washers use to keep from falling off ledges. The ruby slippers of Dorothy of Oz couldn’t compare with the “golden slippers” Aldrin wore in space—foot restraints, resembling wooden Dutch shoes, that he could bolt to a work station in the Gemini equipment bay. One of his neatest tricks was to bring along portable handholds he could slap onto either the Gemini or the Agena to keep his body under control. A variety of space tools went into his pressure suit to go along with him once he exited the cabin. On November 11, 1966, the Gemini 12, the last of its breed, left earth and captured its Agena quarry. Then Buzz Aldrin, once and for all, banished the gremlins of spacewalking. He proved so much a master at it that he seemed more to be taking a leisurely stroll through space than attacking the problems that had frustrated, endangered, and maddened three previous astronauts and brought grave doubts to NASA leadership about the possible success of the manned lunar program. Aldrin moved down the nose of the Gemini to the Agena like a weightless swimmer, working his way almost effortlessly along a six-foot rail he had locked into place once he was outside. Next came looping the end of a hundred-foot line from the Agena to the Gemini for a later experiment, the job that had left Dick Gordon in a sweatbox of exhaustion. Aldrin didn’t show even a hint of heavy breathing, perspiration, or an increased heartbeat. When he spoke, his voice was crisp, sharp, clear. What he did seemed incredibly easy, but it was the direct result of his incisive study of the problems and the equipment he’d brought from earth. He also made sure to move in carefully timed periods, resting between major tasks, and keeping his physical exertion to a minimum. When he reached the workstation in the rear of the Gemini, he mounted his feet and secured his body to the ship with the waist tether. He hooked different equipment to the ship, dismounted other equipment, shifted them about, and reattached them. He used a unique “space wrench” to loosen and tighten bolts with effortless skill. He snipped wires, reconnected wires, and connected a series of tubes. Mission Control hung on every word exchanged between the two astronauts high above earth. “Buzz, how do those slippers work?” Aldrin’s enthusiastic voice came back like music. “They’re great. Great! I don’t have any trouble positioning my body at all.” And so it went, a monumental achievement right at the end of the Gemini program. Project planners had reached all the way to the last inch with one crucial problem still unsolved, and the man named Aldrin had whipped it in spectacular fashion on the final flight. Project Gemini was

Run!” Helena cried and ran down the staircase. Maryse took the steps two at a time, passing Helena on the way, and almost fell as she hit the foyer floor. The scream of police sirens was far too close for comfort, and Maryse struggled to pick up the pace. Skidding on the polished wood, she dashed around the corner and onto the textured tile in the kitchen, where her shoes had a much better grip and she picked up some speed. She ran into the laundry room, shoving down the window where she’d entered the house. Then she rushed out the side door, locking it before she slammed it behind her. She made for the huge hedge of bushes that separated Helena

Yes!” cried a voice the children would never forget. The crowd parted to reveal Count Olaf, who walked toward the Baudelaires with a triumphant gleam in his eyes. “Lock them up!” he said. “We can’t have treacherous people running around the hotel! There are noble, decent people here.” “Really?” asked Colette. “Ha!” Count Olaf said. “I mean, of course! The High Court will decide who’s noble and who’s wicked. In the meantime, the orphans should be locked in a closet.

I pushed Romeo’s horny ass towards Marco and he sat up, startling us both by his speed and grabbed Romeo’s hand, bringing him down on the pillow. He rolled him on his stomach and mounted him like a fucking bull. Before I knew it, he was ramming his cock deep inside Romeo’s ass with fast and brutal strokes. Romeo yelled from the pain that I knew all too well. He tried to crawl away, but Marco gripped his shoulder with one hand and wrapped his arm around his torso with the other, locking in him place as he never missed a beat fucking the hell out of him.

All of you should be locked up. I can't believe you put your babies in your lockers during your practices.

Yet for these high, hard goals to really work their magic, Locke and Latham found that certain moderators—the word psychologists use to describe “if-then” conditions—need to be in place. One of the most important is commitment. “You have to believe in what you’re doing,” continues Latham. “Big goals work best when there’s an alignment between an individual’s values and the desired outcome of the goal. When everything lines up, we’re totally committed—meaning we’re paying even more attention, are even more resilient, and are way more productive as a result.

Once we'd balled up our burrito wrappers and tossed them into the trash, Jake and I walked several blocks from El Farolito to the home of Gus, a rescued shepherd mix that I walked a few afternoons each week. Jake sat on the stoop while I ran upstairs. As usual, Gus was waiting for me at the door of his apartment,; I could hear his tail pounding the floor as I turned the key in the lock. Once I got inside, he hopped around me, nipping delicately at my fingers, nails clackety-clacking at the floor, his tail an ecstatic black blur. I knelt down in front of him, pressed his floppy, expressive ears flat back against his head, and planted a kiss on the side of his long, black schnoz. He whined happily, his whole body shimmying. Gus was one of those dogs who had an entirely different personality at home, where his sense of security gave him the confidence to be joyous and goofy. Out on the street, the shelter pup in him came out and he turned skittish and sorrowful, his tan quotation mark eyebrows pressing together to turn his forehead into a series of of anxious wrinkles. Needless to say, I was gaga for Gus and his layered personality. Downstairs, I could see right away that Jake loved dogs as much as I did. I had to warn him not to try too hard with Gus; too much attention from a stranger would only make Gus more nervous out there in the big loud world. Jake managed to restrain himself for half a block, but soon was cooing down to Gus, running his hand down the length of his silky black-and-tan coat, and passing him a little piece of chorizo from a napkin that he'd somehow slipped into his pocket at El Farolito without me noticing. Gus pressed himself against Jack's leg and looked adoringly up at him as he gobbled the meat, his tail for a moment wagging as freely as it did at home.

ROLL AND FREEZE: Roll up one or two slices of bacon at a time into tight cylinder, place cylinders in zipper-lock bag, and freeze.

As I sit on the folding metal chair I begin to fear getting up. As the finale approaches, I experience outright panic. What if my feet no longer move? What if my muscles lock? What if this neuritis or neuropathy or neurological inflammation has evolved into a condition more malign? I once in my late twenties had an exclusionary diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, believe later by the neurologist who made the diagnosis to be in remission, but what if it is no longer in remission? What if it never was? What if it has returned? What if I stand up from this folding chair in this rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street and collapse, fall to the floor, the folding metal chair collapsing with me? Or what if--- (Another series of dire possibilities occurs to me, this series even more alarming than the last---) What if the damage extends beyond the physical? What if the problem is now cognitive? What if the absence of style that I welcomed at one point---the directness that I encouraged, even cultivated---what if this absence of style has now taken on a pernicious life of its own? What if my new inability to summon the right word, the apt thought, the connection that enables the words to make sense, the rhythm, the music itself--- What if this new inability is systemic? What if I can never again locate the words that work?

that we blow up the sun while simultaneously downloading the consciousnesses of the people locked up on Earth onto a hard drive so they can be resurrected in clone bodies later?

On her way to work the next morning, she is certain this will be one of her last days in Sarajevo. Looking around, she sees how the normal rhythm of the city has been broken and is amazed she didn’t make up her mind to leave before now. Bosnian Serb snipers lie behind sandbags on the tops of buildings and take aim at people in the streets below as if they are sparrows. Sarajevans - old, young, men, women, Muslim, Croat, Serb - dart across the roads in zigzags in an attempt to dodge the bullets. On the tram, passengers duck their heads in a wave when they pass in front of the Jewish Cemetery, where a snipers’ nest is known to be located. Disembarking, a series of blasts sound nearby and she freezes on the tram steps. The man behind pushes her off. They run to take cover in the stone-arched entrance of a locked-up carpet shop. Perhaps a dozen people press up against each other, coffee breath, perfume and the smell of their sweat intermingling. Each explosion sends a collective tremor through them. When they pull apart some twenty minutes later, they don’t look at each other. They brush down their clothes, straighten their shoulders and move off quickly. Zora stares after them, in shock. It’s a quarter to ten on a Tuesday morning. She can’t live like this.

For years I found it annoying to walk my dog. All she ever wanted to do was sniff the grass and trees upon which other dogs had left their scent. Neither of us got much exercise. It was like tug-of-war to get Snickers to move at all. One day, I saw an Instagram video in which a self-designated dog expert explained that dogs might need the sniffing more than the walking. Their brains light up when they sniff, and it can tire them out when they engage in vigorous sniffing. I had noticed how happy Snickers looked when sniffing, but my brain couldn’t connect the dots because sniffing dog urine sounds inherently unpleasant to my human brain. But to the dog, it was the equivalent of checking her social media. I started naming the trees and shrubs in the park accordingly: Muta (formerly known as Facebark), Twigger, LeafedIn, Instabush, and Treemail. Obviously, the garbage receptacle into which people flung their dog poop bags was TikTok.  Once I understood the importance of sniffing, I reframed my experience this way. Usual Frame: Taking the dog for a walk and failing. Reframe: Taking the dog for a sniff and succeeding. That reframe completely changed my subjective experience. Instead of failing at walking, I was succeeding at being a sniff-assistant. Snickers loved the new arrangement, and sure enough, twenty minutes of outdoor sniffing set her attitude right for the rest of the day.  But then I had a new problem. Standing around holding a leash is boring compared to walking. It’s boring compared to most things. But then I reframed my boredom this way. Usual Frame: I have nothing to do. I am just standing here. Reframe: Perfect time to practice proper breathing and posture. Now I spend twenty minutes a day enjoying the outdoors while breathing properly and practicing my posture. It feels good, which is enough to lock in the new habit. Now I am delighted to take my dog to the park. The only thing that changed was how I thought about the point of it all. If you’re like most people, you spend a lot of time standing in line or waiting for one thing or another. It feels like a gigantic waste of time. Maybe you check your phone, but that probably isn’t as useful as it is anxiety-making. As you can tell from the Snickers story, I found a way to turn all mindless waiting time into one of the most productive parts of my day using the good-time-to-breathe reframe.

Hindu treatise on the art of government, the Arthashastra, lays down the rules of policy for the complete tyrant, describing the organization of his palace, his court, and his state in such fashion as to make Machiavelli seem a liberal. The first rule is that he must trust no one, and be without a single intimate friend. Beyond this, he must organize his government as a series of concentric circles composed of the various ministers, generals, officers, secretaries, and servants who execute his orders, every circle constituting a degree of rank leading up to the king himself at the center—like a spider in its web. Beginning with the circle immediately surrounding the king, the circles must consist alternately of his natural enemies and his natural friends. Because the very highest rank of princes will be plotting to seize the king’s power, they must be surrounded and watched by a circle of ministers eager to gain the king’s favor—and this hierarchy of mutually mistrusting circles must go all the way out to the fringe of the web. Divide et impera—divide and rule. Meanwhile, the king remains in the safety of his inmost apartments, attended by guards who are in turn watched by other guards hidden in the walls. Slaves taste his food for poison, and he must sleep either with one eye open or with his door firmly locked on the inside. In case of a serious revolution, there must be a secret, underground passage giving him escape from the center—a passage containing a lever which will unsettle the keystone of the building and bring it crashing down upon his rebellious court. The Arthashastra does not forget to warn the tyrant that he can never win. He may rise to eminence through ambition or the call of duty, but the more absolute his power, the more he is hated, and the more he is the prisoner of his own trap. The web catches the spider. He cannot wander at leisure in the streets and parks of his own capital, or sit on a lonely beach listening to the waves and watching the gulls. Through enslaving others he himself becomes the most miserable of slaves.

that it’s getting tougher and tougher to pin their jobs on hoods, tougher to make a rap stick. For good or ill, that’s the way it is. You damn near have to catch them in the act of dismembering the body … And I had it. I was lugging my damned camera. Maybe there’d been a reason—besides the fact that I had some splendidly provocative shots of Tootsie in the exposed footage—for my hanging onto the Bolex. The next best thing to actually catching hoods in the commission of a crime should be a movie of them in the middle of it. A shot of them chasing after me, shooting at me, should be enough for any court in the land, temporarily. That meant I would have to get into the film somehow, myself, while taking care that the action was merely of the boys shooting at me, not in me. So, for one, I couldn’t stand holding the camera, filming them while they ran down on top of me. And for another, I was going to have to run at least another mile. But I was quite a bit ahead of them now—though a shot still rang out from time to time—so I sprinted as hard as I could for a hundred yards, the last thirty of which were quite straight, and then skidded to a stop. The Bolex was battery-operated and, once started, would function unaided until the film ran out, if I locked the shutter release down. But there was only one hundred feet of film, and that would run past the lens in four minutes. I didn’t think I could be sure of running another mile in four minutes—not after what I’d recently been through. In fact, I was pretty sure I couldn’t. But there was still a way. If I set the camera speed to expose not the normal sixteen frames a second but only eight, which I could do merely by turning a little knob on the side of the camera, the thing would run twice as long, or for eight minutes. True, when projected it would be in fast motion, the action speeded up, but that didn’t matter. The faces—and guns—of those lobs would be identifiable. The only ticklish part, actually, after adjusting the lens aperture and frames-per-second setting, was spotting a limb in the right place and at the right angle to hold the camera firmly. But I found one suitable, jammed the Bolex into place pointing back down the path, depressed and locked the shutter release to start it whirring and moved out of there.

It’s splendid to be always optimistic, magnificently positive, right up there on top of the world every minute of every day; it’s also impossible. But if you’ve got a lock on the world, when you know the bruise in the blood or dull ache in your gut is a temporary thing if only you can con yourself into believing it is, nine times out of ten you can tighten those loose ends and warm the chill wind sighing inside, turn the snake of sadness around until it bites its tail and things start spinning, livening up, getting right again.

I don’t know,’ Jack whispered, before kneeling beside a young woman, her blonde locks matted with dried blood. He could see that she had been shot in the side of her head, the back of her skull blown open by the bullet. ‘Their hands are tied,’ Jack said, as he looked down and saw that the woman’s arms had been bound behind her back with a length of rope. ‘They’ve been executed,’ Reg said, his face white as he looked at the bodies that had been laid out neatly on the floor. ‘A whole bloody family lined up and...’ He shook his head. A cry echoed from the street and Jack turned to where a window overlooked the road. He looked outside and saw a soldier stood in a doorway, the man waving his arm as he called out to where Fred was stood beside a shop. ‘What’s going on?’ the sergeant asked. ‘You’d best come and have a look,’ the man replied. Jack glanced down the street, his eyes staring at the deserted houses that lined the road. He felt a cold chill creep up his spine as he looked at the empty windows from which no lights shone. ‘Wait here,’ Jack said, before making his way out onto the road. He turned as a door swung open, his hand reaching for his rifle, before relaxing as Little stepped out onto the pavement, the corporal’s face a mask of wild anger. ‘The fucking pigs,’ he cursed, before kicking the wall in frustration. ‘Wait until I get my hands on ‘em.’ Jack glanced into the house that Little had searched, his throat catching as he saw the body of a woman on the floor. Beside her a baby lay on the hearth, the child motionless as it lay wrapped in a blanket. ‘The fucking animals,’ Little hissed, as he looked at the deserted houses. ‘Who could do such a thing?’ Ivor asked, his cheeks ashen as he stepped from the house. Jack shook his head, his eyes staring along the road as the men searched the buildings; the cry of alarm echoing along the street. ‘A whole bloody village.’ Jack turned and saw Fred pacing along the road, the battle hardened sergeant shaking his head in confusion as he looked at the houses as if unable to understand what he had seen. ‘What are we going to do?’ Jack asked. ‘Do?’ Little asked, his face possessed with rage. ‘I’m going to kill every fucking one of the evil bastards I can get my hands on.’ The men murmured in agreement, their eyes dark with anger. Jack stood in the street and watched as the first light of a new day shone above the rooftops, the sun casting a gentle warmth over the dead village as the men prepared to move once more.

TWO AND A HALF CENTURIES AGO, Amsterdam was the world’s commercial center, but many of its wealthy merchants were reeling from one of the world’s first financial crises. The shares of the British East India Company had collapsed, culminating in a series of bank failures, government bailouts, and ultimately nationalization, a debacle that rippled across the continent’s nascent markets. For a little-known Dutch merchant and stockbroker, it proved the inspiration for an idea ahead of its time. In 1774, Abraham von Ketwich set up a novel, pooled investment trust he called Eendragt Maakt Magt—Dutch for “Unity Creates Strength.” This would sell two thousand shares for five hundred guilders each to individual investors, and invest the proceeds into a diversified portfolio of fifty bonds. These were divided into ten different categories, from plantation loans, bonds backed by Spanish or Danish toll road payments, to an assortment of European government bonds. At the time, bonds were physical certificates written on paper or even goatskin, and these were stored in a solid iron chest with three locks, which could be opened only by Eendragt Maakt Magt’s board and an independent notary. The aim was to pay a 4 percent annual dividend, and disburse the final proceeds only after twenty-five years, hoping that the diversity of the portfolio would protect investors.1 As it turns out, a subsequent Anglo-Dutch war in 1780 and Napoleon’s occupation of Holland in 1795 wreaked havoc on Eendragt Maakt Magt. The annual payments never materialized, and investors didn’t receive their money back until 1824, albeit then receiving 561 guilders a share. Nonetheless, Eendragt Maakt Magt was a brilliant invention that would go on to inspire the birth of investment trusts in Great Britain and eventually the mutual fund we know today. It is also arguably the ultimate intellectual forefather of today’s index funds, given its minimal trading, diversified approach, and low fees, charging a mere 0.2 percent a year.

When researchers at the University of North Texas and Yale tried to understand why families gradually increased their fast food consumption, they found a series of cues and rewards that most customers never knew were influencing their behaviors.1.24 They discovered the habit loop. Every McDonald’s, for instance, looks the same—the company deliberately tries to standardize stores’ architecture and what employees say to customers, so everything is a consistent cue to trigger eating routines. The foods at some chains are specifically engineered to deliver immediate rewards—the fries, for instance, are designed to begin disintegrating the moment they hit your tongue, in order to deliver a hit of salt and grease as fast as possible, causing your pleasure centers to light up and your brain to lock in the pattern. All the better for tightening the habit loop.1.25

Yet for these high, hard goals to really work their magic, Locke and Latham found that certain moderators—the word psychologists use to describe “if-then” conditions—need to be in place. One of the most important is commitment. “You have to believe in what you’re doing,” continues Latham. “Big goals work best when there’s an alignment between an individual’s values and the desired outcome of the goal. When everything lines up, we’re totally committed—meaning we’re paying even more attention, are even more resilient, and are way more productive as a result.” This is another key point. When Kelly Johnson created the original skunk works, the goal wasn’t to build a new plane in record time—that was just one of many things that happened on the way to the main big goal: saving the world from Nazi peril. This is the kind of big goal everyone can get behind. It’s why the engineers agreed to work horrific hours in a foul-smelling circus tent. And most importantly, because this alignment between core values and desired outcomes jacked up performance and productivity, it became one of the fundamental reasons that plane was delivered in record time. The Secrets of Skunk: Part Two At the Lockheed skunk works, Kelly Johnson ran a tight ship. He loved efficiency. He had a motto—“be quick, be quiet, and be on time”—and a

  The boys hopped into Lee’s brand new, shiny, red truck and started the drive to Freddy’s Pizza. The place was not too far away, especially with Lee’s wild driving.   About 15 minutes later, the boys arrived at the pizza place. They grabbed their supplies and locked the car. They walked up to the front door and looked inside. All the lights were off and the door was locked.   Stampy reached into his pocket and pulled out a key.     He put it into the lock and opened the door up. The restaurant was pitch black. The boys could not see anything.         Stampy felt around the wall and found the light switch. As soon as he turned around, his jaw dropped.   Roaming around in the shadows of restaurant were animatronics characters.   They had creepy smiles and eyes that were scarier than the Ender Dragon!   The boys began shaking. On the floor was a notepad. They quickly grabbed and read it. The note was written by the previous security guard it seemed. Apparently this place wasn’t as fun at night as it was during the day….   The boys could hear the metallic noises of the animatronics. Their hearts began racing.   Stampy felt something behind him. He looked up in horror…   It was Freddy the bear behind Stampy! He had glowing red eyes and looked like he was about to eat Stampy for dinner!   The boys ran out of the door faster than ever.

With you I feel like I'm already good enough; I only have to believe it. I can't lose you again.” He needed to make the confession because he was realising that Lachlan meant as much to him now as he always had. “I know.” Lachlan smiled at him and stopped in their walk to draw him into his arms. Konnor went willingly, clinging onto him. This was exactly how they had said goodbye. It felt like the perfect way to make a promise to always be friends again. “I love you, Konnor,” Lachlan whispered in his ear. “I love you too. If I ever try to hurt you again, lock me up, shoot me, do whatever you have to do…but don't send me away,” he begged him never to separate them again.

The President called it the “Epitome of the American dream.” Daddy called it the “unholy alliance of business and government.” But all it really was, was America giving up. Bailing out in order to join the Financial Resource Exchange. A multinational alliance focused on one thing: profit. Fund global medical care to monopolize vaccines. Back unified currency to collect planet-wide interest. And provide the resources needed for a select group of scientists and military personnel to embark on the first trip across the universe in a quest to find more natural resources—more profit. The answer to my parents’ dreams. And my worst nightmare. And I know something about nightmares, seeing as how I’ve been sleeping longer than I’ve been alive. I hope. What if this is just a part of a long dream dreamt in the short time between when Ed locked the cryo door and Hassan pushed the button to freeze me? What if? It’s a strange sort of sleep, this. Never really waking up, but becoming aware of consciousness inside a too-still body. The dreams weave in and out of memories. The only thing keeping the nightmares from engulfing me is the hope that there couldn’t possibly be a hundred more years before I wake up. Not a hundred years. Not three hundred. Not three hundred and one. Please, God, no. Sometimes it feels like a thousand years have passed; sometimes it feels as if I’ve only been sleeping a few moments. I feel most like I’m in that weird state of half-asleep, half-awake I get when I’ve tried to sleep past noon, when I know I should get up, but my mind starts wandering and I’m sure I can never get back to sleep. Even if I do slip back into a dream for a few moments, I’m mostly just awake with my eyes shut. Yeah. Cryo sleep is like that. Sometimes I think there’s something wrong. I shouldn’t be so aware. But then I realize I’m only aware for a moment, and then, as I’m realizing it, I slip into another dream. Mostly, I dream of Earth. I think that’s because I didn’t want to leave it. A field of flowers; smells of dirt and rain. A breeze ... But not really a breeze, a memory of a breeze, a memory made into a dream that tries to drown out my frozen mind. Earth. I hold on to my thoughts of Earth. I don’t like the dreamtime. The dreamtime is too much like dying. They are dreams, but I’m too out of control, I lose myself in them, and I’ve already lost too much to let them take over. I push the dream-memory down. That happened centuries ago, and it’s too late for regrets now. Because all my parents ever wanted was to be a part of the first manned interstellar exploratory mission, and all I ever wanted was to be with them. And I guess it doesn’t matter that I had a life on Earth, and that I loved Earth, and that by now, my friends have all lived and gotten old and died, and I’ve just been lying here in frozen sleep.

But I’m still breathing. Not deeply; not enough to satisfy, but breathing. Peter pushes my eyelids over my eyes. Does he know I’m not dead? Does Jeanine? Can she see me breathing? “Take the body to the lab,” Jeanine says. “The autopsy is scheduled for this afternoon.” “All right,” Peter replies. Peter pushes the table forward. I hear mutters all around me as we pass the group of Erudite bystanders. My hand falls off the edge of the table as we turn a corner, and smacks in the wall. I feel a prickle of pain in my fingertips, but I can’t move my hand, as hard as I try. This time, when we go down the hallway of Dauntless traitors, it is silent. Peter walks slowly at first, then turns another corner and picks up the pace. He almost sprints down the next corridor, and stops abruptly. Where am I? I can’t be in the lab already. Why did he stop? Peter’s arms slide under my knees and shoulders, and he lifts me. My head falls against his shoulder. “For someone so small, you’re heavy, Stiff,” he mutters. He knows I’m awake. He knows. I hear a series of beeps, and a slide--a locked door, opening. “What do--” Tobias’s voice. Tobias! “Oh my God. Oh--” “Spare me your blubbering, okay?” Peter says. “She’s not dead; she’s just paralyzed. It’ll only last for about a minute. Now get ready to run.” I don’t understand. How does Peter know? “Let me carry her,” Tobias says. “No. You’re a better shot than I am. Take my gun. I’ll carry her.” I hear the gun slide out of its holster. Tobias brushes a hand over my forehead. They both start running. At first all I hear is the pounding of their feet, and my head snaps back painfully. I feel tingling in my hands and feet. Peter shouts, “Left!” at Tobias. Then a shout from down the hallway. “Hey, what--!” A bang. And nothing. More running. Peter shouts, “Right!” I hear another bang, and another. “Whoa,” he mumbles. “Wait, stop here!” Tingling down my spine. I open my eyes as Peter opens another door. He charges through it, and just before I smack my head against the door frame, I stick my arm out and stop us. “Careful!” I say, my voice strained. My throat still feels as tight as it did when he first injected me and I found it difficult to breathe. Peter turns sideways to bring me through the door, then nudges it shut with his heel and drops me on the floor. The room is almost empty, except for a row of empty trash cans along one wall and a square metal door large enough for one of the cans to fit through it along the other wall. “Tris,” Tobias says, crouching next to me. His face is pale, almost yellow. There is too much I want to say. The first thing that comes out is, “Beatrice.” He laughs weakly. “Beatrice,” he amends, and touches his lips to mine. I curl my fingers into his shirt. “Unless you want me to throw up all over you guys, you might want to save it for later.” “Where are we?” I ask. “This is the trash incinerator,” says Peter, slapping the square door. “I turned it off. I’ll take us to the alley. And then your aim had better be perfect, Four, if you want to get out of the Erudite sector alive.” “Don’t concern yourself with my aim,” Tobias retorts. He, like me, is barefoot. Peter opens the door to the incinerator. “Tris, you first.

Treasure is the one who called the cops on you that day at your house. Stupid bitch, your own daughter had you locked up and gave the state info about your welfare scams!

A few times, all the world’s land surface has clumped together into one giant supercontinent, surrounded by one global ocean. Even supercontinents drift, and 450 million years ago the planet was put out of sorts when the supercontinent Gondwana drifted down over the South Pole. As this one and only huge continent completely froze over, the ice and snow piled up, miles thick. So much of the world’s water became locked into these colossal drifts that sea level plummeted. During several million years in this strange configuration, there were multiple glaciations punctuated with more mild interglacials. Both sea level and ocean chemistry fluctuated sharply, dooming many species dependent upon the disappearing and changing coastal environments. This caused the Ordovician–Silurian extinction, probably the second-most extreme mass extinction in Earth history. It seems that the perpetrator was just a “series

Consider fast food, for instance. It makes sense—when the kids are starving and you’re driving home after a long day—to stop, just this once, at McDonald’s or Burger King. The meals are inexpensive. It tastes so good. After all, one dose of processed meat, salty fries, and sugary soda poses a relatively small health risk, right? It’s not like you do it all the time. But habits emerge without our permission. Studies indicate that families usually don’t intend to eat fast food on a regular basis. What happens is that a once a month pattern slowly becomes once a week, and then twice a week—as the cues and rewards create a habit—until the kids are consuming an unhealthy amount of hamburgers and fries. When researchers at the University of North Texas and Yale tried to understand why families gradually increased their fast food consumption, they found a series of cues and rewards that most customers never knew were influencing their behaviors.1.24 They discovered the habit loop. Every McDonald’s, for instance, looks the same—the company deliberately tries to standardize stores’ architecture and what employees say to customers, so everything is a consistent cue to trigger eating routines. The foods at some chains are specifically engineered to deliver immediate rewards—the fries, for instance, are designed to begin disintegrating the moment they hit your tongue, in order to deliver a hit of salt and grease as fast as possible, causing your pleasure centers to light up and your brain to lock in the pattern. All the better for tightening the habit loop.1.25 However, even these habits are delicate. When a fast food restaurant closes down, the families that previously ate there will often start having dinner at home, rather than seek out an alternative location. Even small shifts can end the pattern. But since we often don’t recognize these habit loops as they grow, we are blind to our ability to control them. By learning to observe the cues and rewards, though, we can change the routines.

My mind becomes paralyzed. I lock up. It was like my mouth had frozen shut; I could not speak.

You good?” “Yeah. Okay. Good.” “Now, I’m going to be right here to tell you what to do, and I’ll help you steer if you start running us off the road.” I revved the gas pedal and then placed her foot on it and let her do the same. I could tell she was trying not to bail off of my lap—her body was practically vibrating with nerves—but she didn’t. She stayed, listening intently. I gave her basic instructions, and then I helped her ease onto the road, going about five miles per hour. She didn’t move her hands from two and ten o’clock, and I had to tug at the wheel slightly to straighten us out. And then we picked up speed, just a bit. “How does that feel?” “Like falling,” she whispered, her body rigid, her arms locked on the wheel. “Relax. Falling is easier if you don’t fight it.” “And driving?” “That too. Everything is easier if you don’t fight it.” “What if someone sees us?” “Then I’ll tell you when to wave." She giggled and relaxed slightly against me. I kissed her temple where it rested against my cheek, and she was immediately stiff as a board once more. Shit. I hadn’t thought. I’d just reacted. “I would have patted you on the back, but your forehead was closer,” I drawled. “You’re doin’ it. You’re drivin’.” “How fast are we going?” she said breathlessly. I hoped it was fear and not that kiss. “Oh you’re flyin’, baby. Eight miles an hour. At this rate, we will reach Salt Lake in two days, my legs will be numb, and Henry will want a turn. Give it a little gas. Let’s see if we can push it up to ten.” She pressed her foot down suddenly and we shot forward with a lurch. “Whoa!” I cried, my arms shooting up to brace hers on the wheel. I saw Henry stir from the corner of my eye. “Danika Patrick is the first female NASCAR driver to ever win a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series pole,” he said woodenly, before slumping back down in his seat. I spared him a quick glance, only to see his eyes were closed once more. Millie obviously heard him and she hooted and pressed the gas pedal down a little harder. “Henry just compared you to Danika Patrick. And he obviously isn’t alarmed that you’re driving because he’s already asleep again.” “That’s because Henry knows I’m badass.” “Oh yeah. Badass, Silly Millie. ‘Goin’ ninety miles an hour down a dead-end street,’” I sang a little Bob Dylan, enjoying myself thoroughly.

My favourite quotes, Part Two -- from Michael Connelly's "Harry Bosch" series The Black Box On Bosch’s first call to Henrik, the twin brother of Anneke - Henrik: "I am happy to talk now. Please, go ahead.” “Thank you. I, uh, first want to say as I said in my email that the investigation of your sister’s death is high priority. I am actively working on it. Though it was twenty years ago, I’m sure your sister’s death is something that hurts till this day. I’m sorry for your loss.” “Thank you, Detective. She was very beautiful and very excited about things. I miss her very much.” “I’m sure you do.” Over the years, Bosch had talked to many people who had lost loved ones to violence. There were too many to count but it never got any easier and his empathy never withered. The Burning Room 2 Grace was a young saxophonist with a powerful sound. She also sang. The song was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and she produced a sound from the horn that no human voice could ever touch. It was plaintive and sad but it came with an undeniable wave of underlying hope. It made Bosch think that there was still a chance for him, that he could still find whatever it was he was looking for, no matter how short his time was. ---------------- He grabbed his briefcase off his chair and walked toward the exit door. Before he got there, he heard someone clapping behind him. He turned back and saw it was Soto, standing by her desk. Soon Tim Marcia rose up from his cubicle and started to clap. Then Mitzi Roberts did the same and then the other detectives. Bosch put his back against the door, ready to push through. He nodded his thanks and held his fist up at chest level and shook it. He then went through the door and was gone. The Burning Room 3 “What do you want to know, Bosch?” Harry nodded. His instinct was right. The good ones all had that hollow space inside. The empty place where the fire always burns. For something. Call it justice. Call it the need to know. Call it the need to believe that those who are evil will not remain hidden in darkness forever. At the end of the day Rodriguez was a good cop and he wanted what Bosch wanted. He could not remain angry and mute if it might cost Orlando Merced his due. ------------ “I have waited twenty years for this phone call . . . and all this time I thought it would go away. I knew I would always be sad for my sister. But I thought the other would go away.” “What is the other, Henrik?” Though he knew the answer. “Anger . . . I am still angry, Detective Bosch.” Bosch nodded. He looked down at his desk, at the photos of all the victims under the glass top. Cases and faces. His eyes moved from the photo of Anneke Jespersen to some of the others. The ones he had not yet spoken for. “So am I, Henrik,” he said. “So am I.” Angle of Investigation 1972 They were heading south on Vermont through territory unfamiliar to him. It was only his second day with Eckersly and his second on the job. Now He knew that passion was a key element in any investigation. Passion was the fuel that kept his fire burning. So he purposely sought the personal connection or, short of that, the personal outrage in every case. It kept him locked in and focused. But it wasn’t the Laura syndrome. It wasn’t the same as falling in love with a dead woman. By no means was Bosch in love with June Wilkins. He was in love with the idea of reaching back across time and catching the man who had killed her. The Scarecrow At one time the newsroom was the best place in the world to work. A bustling place of camaraderie, competition, gossip, cynical wit and humor, it was at the crossroads of ideas and debate. It produced stories and pages that were vibrant and intelligent, that set the agenda for what was discussed and considered important in a city as diverse and exciting as Los Angeles.

My favourite quotes, Part Three -- from Michael Connelly's "Harry Bosch" series The Closers Bosch studied the mud-walled structure behind the musician and wondered if Don Francisco Avila had any idea what he was helping to set in motion when he staked his claim to the spot in 1818. A city would grow tall and wide from this place. A city as great as any other. And just as mean. A destination city, a city of invention and reinvention. A place where the dream seemed as easy to reach as the sign they put up on the hill, but a place where the reality was always something different. The road to that sign on the hill had a locked gate across it.

While a 10x improvement is gargantuan, Teller has very specific reasons for aiming exactly that high. “You assume that going 10x bigger is going to be ten times harder,” he continues, “but often it’s literally easier to go bigger. Why should that be? It doesn’t feel intuitively right. But if you choose to make something 10 percent better, you are almost by definition signing up for the status quo—and trying to make it a little bit better. That means you start from the status quo, with all its existing assumptions, locked into the tools, technologies, and processes that you’re going to try to slightly improve.

As he approached Dillon’s door, Gavin ducked his towering six foot three inch frame in an attempt to see below mini-blinds covering up half the glass. Gavin’s eyes landed on Dillon’s back. He stood in front of his desk, his arms crossed. In one swift motion, Gavin swung open the door and closed it. In another, he twisted the lock, sealing them off from anyone who might try to enter. Let the motherfucking games begin. McHugh, Gail (2013-09-17). Pulse: Book Two in the Collide Series (Kindle Locations 1912-1915). Atria Books. Kindle Edition.

day, the trigger was an older woman with deep wrinkles. To this day, I cannot be certain about what caused her to react so strongly. Perhaps she had used up her patience simmering in the sun for hours at the back of the line. Perhaps she had some desperately hungry grandchildren who she needed to get back to. It is impossible to know exactly what happened. But after she received her allocation of wheat, she broke the established rules of the feeding site and moved toward Bubba. She looked up at him and unleashed a verbal attack. Bubba, as gentle as ever, simply smiled at her. The more he smiled, the angrier she got. I noticed the commotion when our Somali guards suddenly tensed and turned toward the disturbance. All I could see was Bubba, head and shoulders above a gathering crowd, seemingly unperturbed, and smiling down at someone. His patient response only fueled the woman’s rage. I heard her sound of fury long before I spotted the source when she launched a long stream of vile curses at Bubba. Thankfully, he didn’t understand a word that she was saying. It was now possible to understand her complaint. She was upset about the quality of the “animal feed” that was being distributed for human consumption. She was probably right in her assessment of the food. These were surplus agricultural products that United Nations contributing members didn’t want, couldn’t sell, and had no other use for. As this hulking American continued to smile, the woman realized that she was not communicating. Now, furious and frustrated, she bent down, set her plastic bag on the ground, grabbed two fistfuls of dirty, broken wheat, grain dust, dirt and chaff. She straightened to her full height and flung the filthy mixture as hard as she could into Bubba’s face. The crowd was deathly silent as I heard a series of loud metallic clicks that indicated that an entire squad of American soldiers had instinctively locked and loaded all weapons in readiness for whatever might happen next. Everything felt frozen in time as everyone waited and watched for Bubba’s reaction. A Somali man might have beaten the woman for such a public insult—and he would have considered his action and his anger entirely justified. I knew that Bubba had traveled half-way around the world at his own expense to spend three months of personal vacation time to help hurting people. And this was the thanks that he received? He was hot, sweaty, and drained beyond exhaustion—and he had just been publicly embarrassed. He had every reason to be absolutely livid. Instead, he raised one hand to rub the grit out of his eyes, and then he gave the woman one more big smile. At that point, he began to sing. And what he sang wasn’t just any song. She didn’t understand the words, of course. But she, and the entire crowd, stood in silent amazement as Bubba belted out the words to the 1950’s Elvis Presley rock-n-roll classic: You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog Cryin’ all the time You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog Cryin’ all the time Well, you ain’t never caught a rabbit And you ain’t no friend of mine. By the time he started singing the next verse, the old woman had turned and stomped off in frustration, angrily plowing a path through the now-smiling crowd of Somalis to make her escape. Watching her go, Bubba raised his voice to send her off with rousing rendition of the final verse: Well they said you was high-classed Well, that was just a lie Ya know they said you was high-classed Well, that was just a lie Well, you ain’t never caught a rabbit And you ain’t no friend of mine.

God damn it, Andre`. I’m about fucking sick of this jacked up shit! Things are going to go my way or else I won’t bring the pretty little fucking mannequin to any more of our play dates! Barbie will get locked away under my fucking key!

You assume that going 10x bigger is going to be ten times harder,” he continues, “but often it’s literally easier to go bigger. Why should that be? It doesn’t feel intuitively right. But if you choose to make something 10 percent better, you are almost by definition signing up for the status quo—and trying to make it a little bit better. That means you start from the status quo, with all its existing assumptions, locked into the tools, technologies, and processes that you’re going to try to slightly improve. It means you’re putting yourself and your people into a smartness contest with everyone else in the world. Statistically, no matter the resources available, you’re not going to win. But if you sign up for moonshot thinking, if you sign up to make something 10x better, there is no chance of doing that with existing assumptions. You’re going to have to throw out the rule book. You’re going to have to perspective-shift and supplant all that smartness and resources with bravery and creativity.

In one set of experiments, for example, researchers affiliated with the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism trained mice to press levers in response to certain cues until the behavior became a habit. The mice were always rewarded with food. Then, the scientists poisoned the food so that it made the animals violently ill, or electrified the floor, so that when the mice walked toward their reward they received a shock. The mice knew the food and cage were dangerous—when they were offered the poisoned pellets in a bowl or saw the electrified floor panels, they stayed away. When they saw their old cues, however, they unthinkingly pressed the lever and ate the food, or they walked across the floor, even as they vomited or jumped from the electricity. The habit was so ingrained the mice couldn’t stop themselves.1.23 It’s not hard to find an analog in the human world. Consider fast food, for instance. It makes sense—when the kids are starving and you’re driving home after a long day—to stop, just this once, at McDonald’s or Burger King. The meals are inexpensive. It tastes so good. After all, one dose of processed meat, salty fries, and sugary soda poses a relatively small health risk, right? It’s not like you do it all the time. But habits emerge without our permission. Studies indicate that families usually don’t intend to eat fast food on a regular basis. What happens is that a once a month pattern slowly becomes once a week, and then twice a week—as the cues and rewards create a habit—until the kids are consuming an unhealthy amount of hamburgers and fries. When researchers at the University of North Texas and Yale tried to understand why families gradually increased their fast food consumption, they found a series of cues and rewards that most customers never knew were influencing their behaviors.1.24 They discovered the habit loop. Every McDonald’s, for instance, looks the same—the company deliberately tries to standardize stores’ architecture and what employees say to customers, so everything is a consistent cue to trigger eating routines. The foods at some chains are specifically engineered to deliver immediate rewards—the fries, for instance, are designed to begin disintegrating the moment they hit your tongue, in order to deliver a hit of salt and grease as fast as possible, causing your pleasure centers to light up and your brain to lock in the pattern. All the better for tightening the habit loop.1.25 However, even these habits are delicate. When a fast food restaurant closes down, the families that previously ate there will often start having dinner at home, rather than seek out an alternative location. Even small shifts can end the pattern. But since we often don’t recognize these habit loops as they grow, we are blind to our ability to control them. By learning to observe the cues and rewards, though, we can change the routines.

For Candrakirti, Bhavaviveka definitely stepped over the demarcation line of the pedagogically unavoidable use of discursiveness and reference points that is necessary for guiding others to utter freedom from such discursiveness. In a way, for Candrakirti (and certainly for Nagarjuna too), Bhavaviveka tried to lock up the wild bird of emptiness in the cage of conventional reference points, such as formal arguments. A bird may touch the earth once in a while, but its actual nature is to roam in the sky without restrictions and independent of the earth. Thus, if one is to experience the free flight of a bird, it does not help to make it sit still by trapping it in a cage and then counting its feathers.

WHOAAA. HOLD YA HORSES MAMA,’ I thought. Holding hands was one thing but I was not stepping up to a full on, lip locking kiss. NO WAY! Not all in the one day anyway.

There have to be rules though.” She pulled out of the kiss, withdrawing her finger as well, sliding it down his chin and throat, leaving a wet trail. “Rules?” Her gaze locked with his. “This can only be sex. Just seven weeks of utterly debauched, completely strings-free sex.” Her finger moved south, swirling around first one nipple then the other. “No expectations. No commitments. No getting attached. No crying like a baby and asking me not to leave.” Ryder laughed at the thought, but there was a husky catch to it as her finger trailed down his abdomen. “I’m not going to fall in love with you,” she continued. “And you’re not going to fall in love with me. I will not give up my dream again, Ryder. Not for you, not for any man. Okay?

Now, whenever she had to leave him, be it for only a few minutes, Caro was seized by an annoying bout of dizziness. Mark would have liked to come along, but, a long time ago, Caro had set the rules in place and she was not about to change them on the spur of the moment. The rules had proved safe and efficient. As long as they were followed to the letter, the chances of success were not diminished while the chances of discovery were minimized. She found the key and locked the service door from inside. She stopped briefly on the stair landing, to give herself a few seconds to think of her next step. The aroma of spiced food wafted from the restaurant's kitchen, mingled with the sour fragrance of demi-sec wine spilled from a broken bottle. Slowly, her mind and body adjusted to the environment. She was ready now. The staircase was unlit. Caro did not switch on the light, but inched up slowly through the dark, careful not to touch any surface, especially the walls or the handrail. She was feeling her way up slowly.

Russell says he’ll either grow up to be massive in the field of dinosaurology and able to keep his parents in the manner to which we’d love to become accustomed, or we’ll have to lock him in the attic for the rest of his life and tell everyone he’s gone to live abroad. It could go either way.

We need not doubt that the Evangelical movement had a powerful effect in waking up eighteenth-century England from its religious apathy, or that eighteenth-century England needed it. Where it failed was in its long-term effects. Religion became identified in the popular mind with a series of moods, in which the worshipper, disposed thereto by all the arts of the revivalist, relished the flavours of spiritual peace. You needed neither a theology nor a liturgy; you did not take the strain of intellectual inquiry, nor associate yourself whole-heartedly with any historic tradition of worship. You floated, safely enough, on the little raft of your own faith, eagerly throwing out the lifeline to such drowning neighbours as were ready to catch it; meanwhile the ship was foundering. It is this by-passing of an historic tradition in favour of a personal experience that has created the modem religious situation in England, and to some extent in the English-speaking world. The Oxford Movement did but lock the door on a stolen horse. On the one hand, it is assumed that every man's religion is his own affair; it does not concern, need not alarm his neighbours. On the other hand, the Christian witness has become a sectional affair; Christianity is one of the fads which people adopt if they are interested in that kind of thing. A poster in a railway station, bidding you be prepared to meet your God, is passed by with an indulgent smile. If people are burdened with a sense of sin, by all means let them seek comfort in some conventicle which promises them release from it; the same is perhaps true of people who begin to feel lonely in old age. But always religion is thought of, instinctively, as a way of changing from one state of mind into another.

The poor, stupid fool,' Williams said, cupping his face with his hands. 'What's that supposed to mean?' Fred asked, his voice defensive. 'What do I mean?' Williams exclaimed, his voice echoing off the rafters. 'What I mean is that you're about as useless as a drunken Frenchman with no thumbs. You're a walking bloody disaster and now you're being put in charge of the Lewis gun section.' 'Captain Elwyn said I was perfect for the role. He said I was just the man for the job,' Fred replied, puffing out his chest with pride. 'Bloody Taffy would be right for the job, why the hell has he given it to you?' 'Because, Taffy never went on that course at the Lewis gun school at Bouchon,' Fred said, smiling smugly. 'You spent half that course drunk and the other half locked up.' 'I still know more about it than, Taffy.' 'I don't want any stripes, you can keep them away from me,' Jones said. 'I should say something,' Williams exclaimed, his voice hesitant.

Teddy is inside Grandma's unbreakable safe behind the secret door hidden at the bottom of the locked basement.

He licked his lips, ignoring the shivers that made his body vibrate or the pain lancing through his body. “D’you know, I’ve been here before?” He lifted his chin, words getting slower. “Another man snatched me away, locked me up, and tortured me for weeks.” He swallowed, vision swimming. “I deserved it, of course. I killed his wife.” A chuckle rumbled in his chest but didn’t quite make it to his lips. “I keep him in my bed nowadays, because it turns out we’re both monsters and torture turns us on.” He smiled, but that gesture fell away when a series of hacking coughs rattled his bones. “A-Ask me his name.” Narrow Face stepped behind him, out of view. “Dude, do I give a fuck about who you’re screwing?” Jay’s face twisted into a disgusted grimace. “I want that name and if—” “Daniel Nieto.” His eyesight was all fucked-up now, but Stavros still made out the sudden stillness that permeated the room. The slight widening of Jay’s eyes, too. Oh, that was satisfying to watch. “Turns out m-monsters can love too, and he loves me as much as I love him. He will c-come for me and he will kill for me. I can’t begin to tell you just how badly you’ve fucked up.” He started laughing, even though it hurt, even though his eyes were crossing and his hands had gone numb. His throat was on fire, his chest the same, but he laughed through all of the pain.

The Codex of Seeds Serpent_120 Dragon woke up. He did his daily routine, and went out into the city. The quickly growing city of GemFall was where this assassin lived. Of course, no one knew he was an assassin. Except for, ya know, the city's sworn enemies, and his partner in crime, Cyber. Their mission was to just get to know the civilians, maybe make some friends, and maybe just, sneak their way up through the military ranks, and maybe detonate all of the city's explosives so they could steal a high-tech blueprint? But that’s just a maybe of course. He met up with Cyber where every highly trained assassin goes to meet up. It was discreet. It was luxurious. It was MCDONALDS. No, seriously. Surly no one would suspect a person at McDonalds. Dragon quickly took a seat and waited for Cyber to arrive. After a while, Cyber arrived. "Wonderful news," Cyber said "You talk like a child, not a professional." "Wow, going after the way I talk now, that’s so mature. Either way, while you were up there lazing in your high-rise apartment, I have been doing work, and now, I have control over the shed." "Wonderful, so now I will be doing the actual important work and completing this mission," said Dragon Cyber sneered at him, gave him the shed pass, and they left. Dragon walked over to the military district in the city. He found the shed, and was about to walk in the door, when he was stopped. "Heya chump, you don't look like Commander Cyber. You can't go in there." A guard stopped him. "Oh really, I seem to have the shed pass, giving me authorization to come in there. If you refuse my entry, that would put your job in jeopardy, and we wouldn't want that, would we?" Dragon liked to be as condescending as possible. He liked when people hated him. He strolled in, grabbed a couple explosives, and headed back out. Then he began he trek towards the vault. It was very uneventful. Then, he got to the vault. He began planting explosives around, in strategic locations. He, well, obviously, then ran away. And waited. \ / - BOOM - / \ Dragon smiled. He saw the small, scorched piece of paper on the ground. He smiled. He snuck over and picked it up. He then felt a tap on his shoulder. "Hello good friend," Cyber said as he plucked the paper out of Dragon's hand. "I believe this belongs to me now." Cyber smirked. He waltzed away as Dragon stared in shock as the military surrounded him, and took him away... It was a long trek from GemFall to the DarkStalk's secret base. But Cyber could handle it. He was happy knowing that his annoying little "teammate" was locked up somewhere far away. Somewhere where he could never tell Cyber's superiors what happened. The real truth of what happened that afternoon... EGamer7201 As I looked upon the enemy that towered above me, I took a step back. This was the worst enemy I had ever seen, and to be honest, I was scared. I took my Nexus Orbs, 3 of them, and got ready to fight. I put the orbs that I had protected with my life on my belt. I took out my glowing blade, with the mystical rune, quintuple darkness stab. This enemy was called Ending. It had Glowing red eyes, and was pure black, and had white spots. I looked at it, scanned it, and the stats were: HP: 13000001 AP (Attack points) : 9999 DP (Defense points) :2000000 Few, this is gonna be hard. I screamed, "FOR THE NEXUS!!!" and teleported toward Ending. TO BE CONTINUED... (Hopefully!) Q & A Blox Is the series almost over?

I fucked up, and I know I can’t go back but I wanna keep the past in the past. Keep you in my present,” reaching in his back pocket to pull out a small red velvet box. “And hopefully have you in my future,” opening it to show me the huge princess diamond cut engagement ring as I gasped. “I’m not tryna go home with my baby mama tonight, and I don’t want to wait until the baby is born for you to be my wife. So will you marry me tomorrow? Take a hood nigga like me to the courthouse, and lock me the fuck down.” He said as my eyes grew wide. Looking at him with my heart pounding harshly against my chest.

This capacity to maintain a long series of exhalations is unique to humans, thanks to bipedal locomotion. In quadrupedal animals like monkeys and apes, the shoulder locks the chest wall whenever the weight is on one arm during movement, and this means they can only take one breath per walking cycle. In humans, the arms are freed from weight-bearing, and so we are able to disconnect the breathing and walking cycles. This becomes important later for the evolution of speech, because this too depends on being able to sustain long, uninterrupted exhalations. Otherwise, we would end up with one-word sentences!

Briefly, there are two types of cells that we inherit from our parents —body cells and germ cells. These cells are composed of chromosomes containing genes—a separate gene for each mental and physical characteristic. The body cells, dividing, multiplying, changing, growing, determine the sort of individual we are to be; the germ cells, remaining practically unchanged from our conception, determine what characteristics our progeny will inherit, through us, from our progenitors and from us. "I determined that heredity could be controlled through the transference of these genes from one individual to another. I learned that the genes never die; they are absolutely indestructible—the basis of all life on earth, the promise of immortality throughout all eternity. "I was certain of all this, but I could carry on no experiments. Scientists scoffed at me, the public laughed at me, the authorities threatened to lock me up in a madhouse. The church wished to crucify me. "I hid, and carried on my research in secret. I obtained genes from living subjects—young men and women whom I enticed to my laboratory on various pretexts. I drugged them and extracted germ cells from them. I had not discovered at that time, or, I should say, I had not perfected the technique of recovering body cells. "In 1858 I managed, through bribery, to gain access to a number of tombs in Westminster Abbey; and from the corpses of former kings and queens of England and many a noble lord and lady I extracted the deathless genes.

Combat had its own infinite series of tests, and one of the greatest sins was “chattering” or “jabbering” on the radio. The combat frequency was to be kept clear of all but strategically essential messages, and all unenlightening comments were regarded as evidence of funk, of the wrong stuff. A Navy pilot (in legend, at any rate) began shouting, “I’ve got a MiG at zero! A MiG at zero!”—meaning that it had maneuvered in behind him and was locked in on his tail. An irritated voice cut in and said, “Shut up and die like an aviator.” One had to be a Navy pilot to appreciate the final nuance. A good Navy pilot was a real aviator; in the Air Force they merely had pilots and not precisely the proper stuff.

find. Henry said she lived right across the hall.” Chapter 14 “So, this is the scene of the crime,” Ida said as they pulled up in front of an old Victorian. From outward appearances, it was hard to imagine that something sinister had happened inside. It was nicely kept, with off-white siding and purple trim. “Looks like a birthday cake,” Ruth said as they walked up the steps toward the purple door. She opened the door to reveal a small entryway. A set of stairs loomed in front of them. Old-fashioned green flowered wallpaper papered the walls. The floor was hardwood, scuffed from years of wear. To the right was a solid oak door with the number Two on it. “According to the case files, Rosa and Henry lived at number two.” Nans gestured toward the door on the other side of the hall which had a number One. “So this one must be Mrs. Pettigrew.” Ruth was standing closest to the door, so she knocked. “Who is it?” A voice drifted out almost before the knock stopped echoing. Clearly, Mrs. Pettigrew kept a close eye on the place and had seen them come in. “It’s the Ladies’ Detective Agency.” Nans’s voice took on an official tone. “We have some questions on a case if you’d be so kind as to answer them.” Of course, Doris Pettigrew would be thrilled to answer questions. If she was truly the busybody that it sounded like she was, she wouldn’t be able to resist the lure of gossip and finding out exactly what case the ladies were referring to. Lexy heard a series of locks clicking and chains sliding, and then the door cracked and a rheumy blue eye appeared. “Do you have any credentials?” “Of course.” Nans shoved a business card at her. It was in a laminate case, so it resembled an official badge of some sort. Doris snatched the card and pulled it inside. It took her a few seconds, but Nans’s card must have passed muster because the door opened and Doris said, “Come in.” Ida went in first. “Oh, this is… unusual.” Lexy peered over Ida’s head. She couldn’t be sure exactly what Ida thought was unusual. There were so many things. It could have been the giant four-foot-tall dolls that stood around the edge of the room. Or it might have been the knitted afghans that covered every surface. Or maybe it was the stuffed animals that were sitting on the couch as if holding a conversation. Then again, it might have been the herd of cats that was sniffing around Ida’s ankles. Doris handed the card back to Nans. “I’m Doris Pettigrew, by the way.” They all introduced themselves, and Doris gestured toward the living room for them to sit. Ida gingerly plucked a large pink elephant off the sofa and put it on the floor then took its place. A black cat immediately jumped into her lap. The rest of the ladies followed her lead, moving dolls aside, disturbing stuffed animals, and pushing cats out of their laps. Lexy sat in the only chair not occupied by a stuffed animal. The smell of mothballs wafted up as the rough wool of the crocheted granny square pillow irritated her arm. Achoo! Helen sneezed and pushed the fluffy tail of a white Persian out of her face.

To lock these men up or threaten them would be no more effective than imprisoning the milkweed or shouting at the kudzu.

Instead of Punishment 1. EXPRESS YOUR FEELINGS STRONGLY—WITHOUT ATTACKING CHARACTER. “I’m furious that my new saw was left outside to rust in the rain!” 2. STATE YOUR EXPECTATIONS. “I expect my tools to be returned after they’ve been borrowed.” 3. SHOW THE CHILD HOW TO MAKE AMENDS. “What this saw needs now is a little steel wool and a lot of elbow grease.” 4. OFFER A CHOICE. “You can borrow my tools and return them or you can give up the privilege of using them. You decide.” 5. TAKE ACTION. Child: “Why is the toolbox locked?” Father: “You tell me why.” 6. PROBLEM-SOLVE. “What can we work out so that you can use my tools when you need them, and so that I’ll be sure they’re there when I need them?

The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip. The body count climbs through a series of globewars. Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases. Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace.

You can’t lock up the barn after the horses are gone.