Manual Car Quotes

When I was sixteen, I had just two things on my mind - girls and cars. I wasn't very good with girls. So I thought about cars. I thought about girls, too, but I had more luck with cars. Let's say that when I turned sixteen, a genie had appeared to me. And that genie said, 'Warren, I'm going to give you the car of your choice. It'll be here tomorrow morning with a big bow tied on it. Brand-new. And it's all yours.' Having heard all the genie stories, I would say, 'What's the catch?' And the genie would answer, 'There's only one catch. This is the last car you're ever going to ge tin your life. So it's got to last a lifetime.' If that had happened, I would have picked out that car. But, can you imagine, knowing it had to last a lifetime, what I would do with it? I would read the manual about five times. I would always keep it garaged. If there was the least little dent or scratch, I'd have it fixed right away because I wouldn't want it rusting. I would baby that car, because it would have to last a lifetime. That's exactly the position you are in concerning your mind and body. You only get one mind and one body. And it's got to last a lifetime. Now, it's very easy to let them ride for many years. But if you don't take care of that mind and that body, they'll be a wreck forty years later, just life the car would be. It's what you do right now, today, that determines how your mind and body will operate ten, twenty, and thirty years from now.

Imagine teaching a fifteen-year-old how to drive a car with manual transmission. First, you have to press down the clutch. Then you have to whisper a secret into one of the cup holders.

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away. His well-founded pride is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.

I'm not going to roll the window down," I told him. "This car doesn't have automatic windows. I'd have to pull over and go around and lower it manually. Besides, it's cold outside, and unlike you, I don't have a fur coat." He lifted his lip in a mock snarl and put his nose on the dashboard with a thump. "You're smearing the windshield," I told him. He looked at me and deliberately ran his nose across his side of the glass. I rolled my eyes. "Oh, that was mature. The last time I saw someone do something that grown-up was when my little sister was twelve.

Understanding your MBTI type can help you understand how to care for yourself and how to better relate to the people around you. It’s similar to being given the owner’s manual for a certain model of car—your preferred model.

While they waited, Ronan decided to finally take up the task of teaching Adam how to drive a stick shift. For several minutes, it seemed to be going well, as the BMW had an easy clutch, Ronan was brief and to the point with his instruction, and Adam was a quick study with no ego to get in the way. From a safe vantage point beside the building, Gansey and Noah huddled and watched as Adam began to make ever quicker circles around the parking lot. Every so often their hoots were audible through the open windows of the BMW. Then—it had to happen eventually—Adam stalled the car. It was a pretty magnificent beast, as far as stalls went, with lots of noise and death spasms on the part of the car. From the passenger seat, Ronan began to swear at Adam. It was a long, involved swear, using every forbidden word possible, often in compound-word form. As Adam stared at his lap, penitent, he mused that there was something musical about Ronan when he swore, a careful and loving precision to the way he fit the words together, a black-painted poetry. It was far less hateful sounding than when he didn’t swear. Ronan finished with, “For the love of . . . Parrish, take some care, this is not your mother’s 1971 Honda Civic.” Adam lifted his head and said, “They didn’t start making the Civic until ’73.” There was a flash of fangs from the passenger seat, but before Ronan truly had time to strike, they both heard Gansey call warmly, “Jane! I thought you’d never show up. Ronan is tutoring Adam in the ways of manual transmissions.” Blue, her hair pulled every which way by the wind, stuck her head in the driver’s side window. The scent of wildflowers accompanied her presence. As Adam catalogued the scent in the mental file of things that made Blue attractive, she said brightly, “Looks like it’s going well. Is that what that smell is?” Without replying, Ronan climbed out of the car and slammed the door. Noah appeared beside Blue. He looked joyful and adoring, like a Labrador retriever. Noah had decided almost immediately that he would do anything for Blue, a fact that would’ve needled Adam if it had been anyone other than Noah. Blue permitted Noah to pet the crazy tufts of her hair, something Adam would have also liked to do, but felt would mean something far different coming from him.

The amount of improvement that has occurred in computer technology in the past half century is truly staggering and unprecedented in other industries. ... If cars had improved at this rate in the same time period, a Rolls Royce would now cost 10 dollars and get a billion miles per gallon. (Unfortunately, it would probably also have a 200-page manual telling how to open the door.)

Even if it takes manually fixing millions of old cars to equal healing one tiny plant, she’ll do it. Silly. But she has enough time to be silly. Just not enough of it to evolve.

Please, ma’am. Please help me. You seem like someone who really appreciates knowledge and learning, and I’d be so grateful if you’d share just a little of your wisdom.” “Why should I help?” she asked. I could tell she was intrigued, though. Flattery really could get you places. “You don’t have any superior knowledge to offer me.” “Because I’m superior in other things. Help me, and I’ll . . . I’ll fix your car out front. I’ll change the tire. That threw her off. “You’re in a skirt.” “I’m offering you what I can. Manual labor in exchange for wisdom.” “I don’t believe you can do it,” she said after several long moments. I crossed my arms. “It’s an eyesore.” “You have fifteen minutes,” she snapped. “I only need ten.

Flinstoning” is a metaphor for this car, except in software, where missing product functionality is replaced with manual human effort.

Because I'm superior in other things. Help me, and I'll...I'll fix your car out front. I'll change your tire." That threw her off. "You're in a skirt" "I'm offering you what I can. Manual labor in exchange for wisdoms." "I don't believe you can do it," she said after several long moments. I crossed my arms. "It's an eyesore." "You have fifteen minutes." "I only need ten." Naturally Adian felt the need to "supervise" my work. "Are you going to get made if I tell you how hot this Is?

Describing good relatedness to someone, no matter how precisely or how often, does not inscribe it into the neural networks that inspire love. Self-help books are like car repair manuals: you can read them all day, but doing so doesn't fix a thing. Working on a car means rolling up your sleeves and getting under the hood, and you have to be willing to get dirt on your hands and grease beneath your fingernails. Overhauling emotional knowledge is no spectator sport; it demands the messy experience of yanking and tinkering that comes from a limbic bond. If someone's relationship today bear a troubled imprint, they do so because an influential relationship left its mark on a child's mind. When a limbic connection has established a neural pattern, it takes a limbic connection to revise it.

The power to concentrate exists in everyone, but few people can concentrate sufficiently to drive a motor car with complete mastery in all circumstances. Roadcraft The Police Driver's Manual, 1960

He went through the vehicle usage manual in his head and recalled the simulator training. Then he unlocked the car, ushered her in, and started the engine. All went well until he rammed into the car parked in front.

Once you get a girl without having relied on any external value for your attractiveness, you also know for sure that she really likes you and that she will be yours for as long as you want her to be, as long as you do not change. You do not have to hide the fact that you lost your job, your car broke down, or that you are still living with your parents. Your relationship will be less stressful and more honest, which is healthy.

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on.

how many love stories begin with, “He yelled at me from his car as I was going to work?” If

What kind of transmission?” he quizzed her. “S-Six speed manual.” “Good girl. Did you notice the tires?” he asked as he stroked her clit and pressed her G-spot simultaneously. “Pirelli’s,” she groaned.

It may take seconds for a human sitting in the driver’s seat, possibly distracted by an email or worse, to return to “situational awareness” and safely resume control of the car. Indeed the Google researchers may have already come up against the limits to autonomous driving. There is currently a growing consensus that the “handoff” problem—returning manual control of an autonomous car to a human in the event of an emergency—may not actually be a solvable one.

Imagine teaching a fifteen-year-old how to drive a car with manual transmission. First, you have to press down the clutch. Then you have to whisper a secret into one of the cup holders. In Diane’s case, this was easy, as she was not a very social or public person, and most any mundane thing in her life could be a secret. In Josh’s case this was hard, because for teenagers most every mundane thing in their lives is a secret that they do not like sharing in front of their parents. Then, after the clutch and the secret, the driver has to grab the stick shift, which is a splintered wood stake wedged into the dashboard, and shake it until something happens—anything really—and then simultaneously type a series of code numbers into a keyboard on the steering wheel. All this while sunglasses-wearing agents from a vague yet menacing government agency sit in a heavily tinted black sedan across the street taking pictures (and occasionally waving). This is a lot of pressure on a first-time driver.

For my grandparents, Armco was an economic savior—the engine that brought them from the hills of Kentucky into America’s middle class. My grandfather loved the company and knew every make and model of car built from Armco steel. Even after most American car companies transitioned away from steel-bodied cars, Papaw would stop at used-car dealerships whenever he saw an old Ford or Chevy. “Armco made this steel,” he’d tell me. It was one of the few times that he ever betrayed a sense of genuine pride. Despite that pride, he had no interest in my working there: “Your generation will make its living with their minds, not their hands,” he once told me. The only acceptable career at Armco was as an engineer, not as a laborer in the weld shop. A lot of other Middletown parents and grandparents must have felt similarly: To them, the American Dream required forward momentum. Manual labor was honorable work, but it was their generation’s work—we had to do something different. To move up was to move on. That required going to college.

In the wintertime, make sure to leave your blades standing up to ensure they don't freeze against the glass because if you star to run the wipers, you can pull on the mechanism and this may cause them to not work properly and lead to a costly visit to the mechanic.

Who’s winning?” “I don’t have a f*cking clue nor do I f*cking care.” Echo’s head ticks back. “Back off, Beth.” I cross the room, drop a kiss on the curve of Echo’s neck and whisper in her ear, “She’d rip me to pieces, too, right now. She’s a b*tch when the Yankees play.” Her eyebrows rise. “Is she a Red Sox fan?” Isaiah chuckles and we both throw him a glare, but he doesn’t notice as he’s absorbed in a car manual. “Beth hates baseball.” Echo’s eyes dart from Beth to the television to me then she waves her hand in the air for an explanation. “She watches,” I explain. “Yankees only. It’s what she does and there are some things we don’t question about each other.” “Just the Yankees?” Echo whispers. “Just the Yankees,” I repeat. “And she hates baseball?” “With a passion.” “That’s...” Echo says in a hushed tone. “That’s messed up.

Carly Fiorina took over Hewlett-Packard shortly before the tech bubble burst. Anne Mulcahy got a shot at being the first female CEO at Xerox—precisely as the company was being investigated by the SEC. What do these leaders have in common? They are women. Women who were given big responsibilities right as the shit hit the fan. Which meant that when they failed—almost inevitably—the problem was blamed on them, not the surrounding circumstances.

We're all sober kids, all in the same Advanced Placement (AP) classes, and therefore do not get invited to parties and their concomitant opportunities to imbibe. We wouldn't drink even if we did. We are APs, or Apeys for short. We do not go to "keggers" or "ragers." Instead of parties, we find empty parking structures and host midnight table reads of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead." We pile into my car, a teenaged front-wheel drive Consta with manual windows, and drive halfway to Las Vegas just to see a meteor shower and get a good look at Orion's scabbard in the flawless black desert sky. To be clear, we never actually continue on to Vegas. Whatever happens in Vegas, whatevers in Vegas, who cares. We turn the car around and head home and wonder about life outside Earth, and whether we'll ever encounter aliens or they're just ignoring us because we're so embarrassingly primitive, or if the Fermi paradox is true and we really are the only intelligent beings in the entire universe.

But Linda and Bob are good, old friends. I feel their warmth even though they aren't there. Come and blueberry jelly on the sheets. Racing forms and cigarette butts in the bathroom. Notes from Bob to Linda: "Buy some smokes and take the car ... dooh-dah dooh-dah." Drawings by Andrea with Love to Mom. Pizza crusts. I clean their coke mirror with Windex. It is the only place I work that isn't spotless to begin with. It's filthy in fact, Every Wednesday I climb the stairs like Sisyphus into their living room where it always looks like they are in the middle of moving.

An extensive biomedical literature has established that individuals are more likely to activate a stress response and are more at risk for a stress-sensitive disease if they (a) feel as if they have minimal control over stressors, (b) feel as if they have no predictive information about the duration and intensity of the stressor, (c) have few outlets for the frustration caused by the stressor, (d) interpret the stressor as evidence of circumstances worsening, and (e) lack social support-for the duress caused by the stressors. Psychosocial stressors are not evenly distributed across society. Just as the poor have a disproportionate share of physical stressors (hunger, manual labor, chronic sleep deprivation with a second job, the bad mattress that can't be replaced), they have a disproportionate share of psychosocial ones. Numbing assembly-line work and an occupational lifetime spent taking orders erode workers' sense of control. Unreliable cars that may not start in the morning and paychecks that may not last the month inflict unpredictability. Poverty rarely allows stress-relieving options such as health club memberships, costly but relaxing hobbies, or sabbaticals for rethinking one's priorities. And despite the heartwarming stereotype of the "poor but loving community," the working poor typically have less social support than the middle and upper classes, thanks to the extra jobs, the long commutes on public transit, and other burdens. Marmot has shown that regardless of SES, the less autonomy one has at work, the worse one's cardiovascular health. Furthermore, low control in the workplace accounts for about half the SES gradient in cardiovascular disease in his Whitehall population.

School Library Journal Gr 3–6—This interactive manual is fun to read and even more fun to put into practice. From hopscotch to dodge ball, jacks to solitaire, and string games to memory games, all types of activities are included. Games to play with a ball, with cards, in a car on the go, alone, or in a group are all here to be enjoyed. The instructions are clear and easy to follow. There are also historical and factual asides for many of the entries. Some include variations on the main game or alternate names for the activity that have been used through the years. The illustrations depict children demonstrating a particular aspect of a game or just enjoying themselves playing. This is a great resource for parents and teachers, as well as for children.—Cynde Suite, Bartow County Library System, Adairsville, GA

Human bodies are extremely complicated and over the years I learned three important things about them, none of which I had been taught by lecturers or professors at my medical school. First, I learned that no two bodies are identical and there are an infinite number of variations. Not even twins are truly identical. When I first started to study medicine I used to think how much easier it would be for us all (doctors and patients) if bodies came with an owner's manual, but the more I learned about medicine the more I realised that such a manual would have to contain so many variations, footnotes and appendices that it wouldn't fit into the British Museum let alone sit comfortably on the average bookshelf. Even if manuals were individually prepared they would still be too vast for practical use. However much we may think we know about illness and health there will always be exceptions; there will always be times when our prognoses and predictions are proved wrong. Second, I learned that the human body has enormous, hidden strengths, and far greater power than most of us ever realise. We tend to think of ourselves as being delicate and vulnerable. But, in practice, our bodies are tougher than we imagine, far more capable of coping with physical and mental stresses than most of us realise. Very few of us know just how strong and capable we can be. Only if we are pushed to our limits do we find out precisely what we can do. Third, I learned that our bodies are far better equipped for selfdefence than most of us imagine, and are surprisingly well-equipped with a wide variety of protective mechanisms and self-healing systems which are designed to keep us alive and to protect us when we find ourselves in adverse circumstances. The human body is designed for survival and contains far more automatic defence mechanisms, designed to protect its occupant when it is threatened, than any motor car. To give the simplest of examples, consider what happens when you cut yourself. First, blood will flow out of your body for a few seconds to wash away any dirt. Then special proteins will quickly form a protective net to catch blood cells and form a clot to seal the wound. The damaged cells will release special substances into the tissues to make the area red, swollen and hot. The heat kills any infection, the swelling acts as a natural splint - protecting the injured area. White cells are brought to the injury site to swallow up any bacteria. And, finally, scar tissue builds up over the wounded site. The scar tissue will be stronger than the original, damaged area of skin. Those were the three medical truths I discovered for myself. Over the years I have seen many examples of these three truths. But one patient always comes into my mind when I think about the way the human body can defy medical science, prove doctors wrong and exhibit its extraordinary in-built healing power.

Before the Industrial Revolution began, the world’s population was less than one billion, mostly consisting of rural farmers who did all their work using manual labor or domesticated animals. Now there are seven billion people, more than half of us live in cities, and we use machines to do the majority of our work. Before the Industrial Revolution, people’s work on the farm required a wide range of skills and activities, such as growing plants, tending animals, and doing carpentry. Now many of us work in factories or offices, and people’s jobs often require them to specialize in doing just a few things, such as adding numbers, putting the doors on cars, or staring at computer screens. Before the Industrial Revolution, scientific inventions had little effect on the daily life of the average person, people traveled little, and they ate only minimally processed food that was grown locally. Today, technology permeates everything we do, we think nothing of flying or driving hundreds or thousands of miles, and much of the world’s food is grown, processed, and cooked in factories far from where it is consumed. We have also changed the structure of our families and communities, the way we are governed, how we educate our children, how we entertain ourselves, how we get information, and how we perform vital functions like sleep and defecation. We have even industrialized exercise: more people get pleasure from watching professional athletes compete in televised sports than by participating in sports themselves.6

CALL TO LOVING ARMS “Can’t you hear it?” I didn’t need a car in London. But when we moved to America, my husband taught me to drive on the manual-shift car he’d bought second-hand at age 16. I struggled to learn when to change gears. I’d start in first and accelerate until the car was pleading for second. Focused on the road ahead, I’d miss the tell-tale sound. “Can’t you hear it?” Bryan would ask. I’d rush to switch from accelerator to clutch, grab the gear stick, pull it back, and slide it across so I could push it forward again into second. And so we’d go on, until the car was crying out for third. Perhaps, like me, you’re a follower of Jesus, and you want to keep your foot on the gas. There is so much that we Christians need to do, and so far we need to go to see people from every tribe and nation won for Christ. But after 12 years living in America, I’m convinced that in order to make progress we must change gears. Rather than just ramming our foot down, we must pull the gear stick back and do the hard work of repentance before shifting into second or third.

It really is a monstrous house,’ she thought, and recognized this to be what Dr Sedum had described in one of his ’talks’ as a mechanical pattern reaction – something to be avoided if one was to evolve. But later on in the same talk he had said that we were all liars because we were incapable of responding consistently to our environment, and then she didn’t know what to think. When she had asked Lavinia after the Time, as meetings were called in the League, Lavinia had said that one could not start at all, until one had perceived the Paradox. She had only been to one Time, and when Lavinia had said that she must not try to walk before she could fly, she realized that she had a long way to go. The moment she got into the kitchen, Claude hoisted himself wearily out of the vegetable trug by the Aga and set about his usual process of tripping her up until she had provided him with his early morning milk. This morning, she gave in to him at once; she wanted nothing to interfere with the clockwork routine which was to conclude with Herbert catching his train to London. She had told him she was having a cousin to lunch several days ago, but he had been deep in some gardening manual, and she had not been sure whether he had heard. Two hours later she waved to Herbert as he lurched down the drive in the old Wolseley. Alice had washed the car once a week before she had married, but it was one more of those things which May simply didn’t seem to get time to do. A final wave – he would not have seen her, but he liked all his expeditions to be taken seriously – and she heaved at the huge iron-studded front door until it shut with a prison-like click. There was a terrific amount to do before Dr Sedum and Lavinia arrived, but she was so exhausted with anxiety and the feeling that she was doing something exciting and momentous behind Herbert’s back that she fled to the kitchen for a cup of coffee and a cigarette (Herbert did not like her to smoke in the mornings). ‘I’ll make a list,’ she thought. She always resorted to lists: they proved that she had a great deal to do, and to some extent, as she crossed things off, they proved that she was doing them. Mrs

Robert Cialdini's "Influence" is the single best place to start to read about the social psychology of persuasion, and at first glance the book looks like an overwhelming testimony to irrationality in our interactions with one another. This classic work explores six major factors which can help persuade other people. For example, one major factor is “reciprocity”, whereby we feel compelled to give something back when people have given something to us (for example when a car salesperson has agreed to cut the price by 10%, maybe we feel we should raise the amount we’re willing to pay in return). There’s no need to labour the opportunities for the unscrupulous to take advantage of this kind of habit of mind. None of Cialdini’s important persuasion factors are rational argument, so at one reading of Cialdini’s manual of persuasion is coming firmly from the “we’re irrational” side. But there is another interpretation. Much of the evidence on which the power of these factors to aid persuasion is based assumes a situation where you have an at least half-way rational argument to begin with. Rationality is the background against which these irrational factors create variation.

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.

3. “Back in 2016, no one knew what Build, Build, Build meant or what it stood for. Critics had very little expectation of the team. They wagered against our success, not knowing that when they did, they gambled against the future of their country. They were certain that the infrastructure projects would never materialize — that blueprints would remain as drawings. They didn’t expect 6.5 million Filipinos to stand and work behind it. “ - Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo , Night Owl: A Nationbuilder’s Manual 2nd Edition (p. 142, Build, Build, Build Projects CAR Region)

Back in 2016, when Build, Build, Build was just starting, a lot of people had doubts. One friend looked me in the eye and said, “This was another campaign promise meant to be broken.” We were likened to ardent suitors prepared to say anything. We could not blame them. At that time, it did seem impossible. Traffic in Metro Manila was costing us ₱3.5 billion a day. EDSA has exceeded its capacity by over a hundred thousand vehicles. Government projects were delayed for years — with some projects implemented only after several decades. But while we were all very familiar with this reality, it was not a reality we were prepared to accept. The Philippines was far from its full potential. To many of us, it was a chance to realize a dream. It was a chance to shape history and usher in the Golden Age of Infrastructure.” - Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo , Night Owl: A Nationbuilder’s Manual 2nd Edition (p. 112, Build, Build, Build Projects CAR Region)

The handful of 1960 300Fs built with the Pont-A-Mousson 4-speed manual transmission (sources claim between 7 and 15) incorporated a highly unconventional means of activating the reverse lamps.

Aren’t you proud that you know how to use a dial phone? That you lived a whole, full life without a digital device in your pocket? You remember who Gilligan is! You watched Fonzie jump the shark! You remember when coming in second place was still awesome. You know how to use a phone book and roll down a window manually. You probably drove a stick shift. As a kid, you played outside all day until dinner. You lived in a time when you could walk your loved ones all the way to the gate in an airport. The guy who sang your favorite song on the radio wasn’t also a model. You know what “Where’s the beef?” means and remember when everyone ate Hamburger Helper. You watched Jaws at the drive-in. We have seen a lot. We survived Aqua Net. We were the last generation of children to ride in a car without seat belts! And there’s nothing shameful in saying that.

Whenever you wonder if there is something you need to get girls, a good first step in the right direction is to consider if the matter you contemplate even existed long ago during “the age of cavemen.” If the answer is no, then it is likely you do not need it now either. That simple thought experiment does not rule out all that is unnecessary, but it instantly rules out money and cars, for instance.

Knowledge work is where agricultural work was at the dawn of the industrial economy. Then, the machines of the industrial economy, like the steam shovel and cotton gin, automated manual work. Now, the software of the information economy, from ATMs to self-driving cars and the AI able to make medical diagnosis, is automating knowledge work.

In order to select a gear, the clutch pedal must be depressed - I don’t mean ‘not happy’, I mean pushed fully to the floor!

After checking the manual again, she located the mat in the trunk and peeled it back, then unscrewed the big winged nut holding down a sort of cardboard cover. Beneath it—shazaam!—lay the spare tire and pieces of what the instructions assured her was the jack. If only she had the faintest notion how to assemble it. She removed the metal components and shivered again. She’d packed a set of long johns, but she wasn’t eager to spend time removing boots or stripping off jeans. Activity would warm her. Keep moving. Next the tire, which was determined not to leave its cocoon. She was strong for her size from years of hauling around big pots, but never had she cursed her small stature more. The thing weighed a ton, and it was wedged in there so tightly she couldn’t get it to budge. She’d go to the next step, then come back to the stupid spare. Nothing went better after that. Jacking up the car was a nightmare, and trying to loosen what the book called lug nuts simply wasn’t happening. Cold and scared and frustrated, Scarlett forced herself to think hard about the alternative: walking back to Sweetgrass Springs. But the town had been deserted except for Ruby’s,

Where did you find those? They’re beautiful.” His face fell, and for a while he didn’t respond to me. It wasn’t until we were in the car on the way to the hospital that he finally murmured, “One of the guys on Dad’s crew helped me make them.” I turned quickly in my seat to look at him, and stared blankly for a few seconds. “You made those. The bookshelves.” Jentry nodded slowly. “I used to work for my dad when I was in high school. Dec did, too. He could have built shelves if you’d asked him to. Declan only deals with the business side now and hasn’t done any of the manual stuff since we graduated from high school. Neither had I, which is why I had help.” “Jentry . . . thank you.” I didn’t know what else to say. I wanted to go over every detail of the shelves, but couldn’t seem to figure out how to now that I knew that Jentry had done all of that for me. “Just, thank you.” He shrugged nonchalantly. “You needed shelves so your books wouldn’t just stay boxed up in the closet.” “But those . . .” I trailed off and shook my head. “Those were exactly what I described, and they’re—

Some depression is not long term, some depression is circumstantial, particularly in reference to African Americans. An African American can be diagnosed with depression due to meeting criteria outlined within the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, written by American Psychiatric Association, though that may be a snap shot of a temporary circumstance. The same person a clinician may have diagnosed with depression may have lost a job, house, car or healthcare. The person diagnosed could be homeless, stressed out, crying, unable to sleep or over sleeping, depending on others or having no one to depend on. Yet things could turn around for the person then all of the symptoms that were present may all go away once the person is able to sustain” (McEachern 175).

Before We Begin Is Your Bug A nice clean original car that looks almost like it left the showroom yesterday? P.S. All work should be carried out in consultation with a reliable workshop manual with regard to torque settings, gaps, procedures, sequences disassembly, reassembly, where to hide the leftover parts, etc. I will accept no responsibility for anything resulting from you or anybody else trying anything as described in this document whatsoever – but if it works or you end up with some amusing stories to tell someone else’s grandchildren, please feel free to drop me a line. (No death threats please.) Sincerely, Christina Engela

H. Srikrishnan, then head of transactional banking and operations, gave me an example, ‘We looked at funds transfer—which was manual—such as MTs (mail transfers) and TTs (telegraphic transfers). When we implemented a centralized banking solution, the key things we could do were to sweep across multiple locations and get the balances of customers or transfer funds from one location to another using core banking. Those were big problems we solved.’ HDFC Bank was thus the first among Indian banks to have a centralized system. Whilst foreign banks like Citibank had centralized systems, they lacked the branch strength to fully leverage them. It is worth remembering that in the mid-1990s, banking didn’t really exist in the form that we know of today. Customers could open bank accounts, but the whole gamut of products (home loan, car loan, etc.) and services (Internet banking) was just not available. Salaries would still be paid by cheque and employees would have to take time off from their jobs to go to the bank, write a deposit slip, hand it over to the teller and then wait for the cheque to get cleared. Also, the employer would have to take time off to sit and sign numerous salary cheques to be given to all the employees. Compare this to the instant, online credit of salary today and a notification by SMS and email at the end of every month! HDFC Bank’s centralized technology platform allowed it to kick-off a revolution in how employees were paid their salaries.

I also believe strongly in the powerful words: “I took the road less traveled, and that has made all the difference.” They are good ones to live by. The big, final motivator was that I really wasn’t enjoying my university studies. I loved the Brunel and our small group of buddies there, but the actual university experience was killing me. (Not the workload, I hasten to add, which was pleasantly chilled, but rather the whole deal of feeling like just another student.) Sure, I like the chilled lifestyle (like the daily swim I took naked in the ornamental lake in the car park), but it was more than that. I just didn’t like being so unmotivated. It didn’t feel good for the soul. This wasn’t what I had hoped for in my life. I felt impatient to get on and do something. (Oh, and I was learning to dislike the German language in a way that was definitely not healthy.) So I decided it was time to make a decision. Via the OTC, Trucker and I quietly went to see the ex-SAS officer to get his advice on our Special Forces Selection aspirations. I was nervous telling him. He knew we were troublemakers, and that we had never taken any of the OTC military routine at all seriously. But to my amazement he wasn’t the least bit surprised at what we told him. He just smiled, almost knowingly, and told us we would probably fit in well--that was if we passed. He said the SAS attracted misfits and characters--but only those who could first prove themselves worthy. He then told us something great, that I have always remembered. “Everyone who attempts Selection has the basic mark-one body: two arms, two legs, one head, and one pumping set of lungs. What makes the difference between those that make it and those that don’t, is what goes on in here,” he said, touching his chest. “Heart is what makes the big difference. Only you know if you have got what it takes. Good luck…oh, and if you pass I will treat you both to lunch, on me.” That was quite a promise from an officer--to part with money. So that was that. Trucker and I wrote to 21 SAS HQ, nervously requesting to be put forward for Selection. They would do their initial security clearances on us both, and then would hopefully write, offering us (or not) a place on pre-Selection--including dates, times, and joining instructions. All we could do was wait, start training hard, and pray. I tossed all my German study manuals unceremoniously into the bin and felt a million times better. And deep down I had the feeling that I might just be embarking on the adventure of a lifetime. On top of that, there was no Deborah Maldives saying I needed a degree to join the SAS. The only qualification I needed was inside that beating heart of mine.

When Warren was a little boy fingerprinting nuns and collecting bottle caps, he had no knowledge of what he would someday become. Yet as he rode his bike through Spring Valley, flinging papers day after day, and raced through the halls of The Westchester, pulse pounding, trying to make his deliveries on time, if you had asked him if he wanted to be the richest man on earth—with his whole heart, he would have said, Yes. That passion had led him to study a universe of thousands of stocks. It made him burrow into libraries and basements for records nobody else troubled to get. He sat up nights studying hundreds of thousands of numbers that would glaze anyone else’s eyes. He read every word of several newspapers each morning and sucked down the Wall Street Journal like his morning Pepsi, then Coke. He dropped in on companies, spending hours talking about barrels with the woman who ran an outpost of Greif Bros. Cooperage or auto insurance with Lorimer Davidson. He read magazines like the Progressive Grocer to learn how to stock a meat department. He stuffed the backseat of his car with Moody’s Manuals and ledgers on his honeymoon. He spent months reading old newspapers dating back a century to learn the cycles of business, the history of Wall Street, the history of capitalism, the history of the modern corporation. He followed the world of politics intensely and recognized how it affected business. He analyzed economic statistics until he had a deep understanding of what they signified. Since childhood, he had read every biography he could find of people he admired, looking for the lessons he could learn from their lives. He attached himself to everyone who could help him and coattailed anyone he could find who was smart. He ruled out paying attention to almost anything but business—art, literature, science, travel, architecture—so that he could focus on his passion. He defined a circle of competence to avoid making mistakes. To limit risk he never used any significant amount of debt. He never stopped thinking about business: what made a good business, what made a bad business, how they competed, what made customers loyal to one versus another. He had an unusual way of turning problems around in his head, which gave him insights nobody else had. He developed a network of people who—for the sake of his friendship as well as his sagacity—not only helped him but also stayed out of his way when he wanted them to. In hard times or easy, he never stopped thinking about ways to make money. And all of this energy and intensity became the motor that powered his innate intelligence, temperament, and skills.

THINK OF THE WAY a stretch of grass becomes a road. At first, the stretch is bumpy and difficult to drive over. A crew comes along and flattens the surface, making it easier to navigate. Then, someone pours gravel. Then tar. Then a layer of asphalt. A steamroller smooths it; someone paints lines. The final surface is something an automobile can traverse quickly. Gravel stabilizes, tar solidifies, asphalt reinforces, and now we don’t need to build our cars to drive over bumpy grass. And we can get from Philadelphia to Chicago in a single day. That’s what computer programming is like. Like a highway, computers are layers on layers of code that make them increasingly easy to use. Computer scientists call this abstraction. A microchip—the brain of a computer, if you will—is made of millions of little transistors, each of whose job is to turn on or off, either letting electricity flow or not. Like tiny light switches, a bunch of transistors in a computer might combine to say, “add these two numbers,” or “make this part of the screen glow.” In the early days, scientists built giant boards of transistors, and manually switched them on and off as they experimented with making computers do interesting things. It was hard work (and one of the reasons early computers were enormous). Eventually, scientists got sick of flipping switches and poured a layer of virtual gravel that let them control the transistors by punching in 1s and 0s. 1 meant “on” and 0 meant “off.” This abstracted the scientists from the physical switches. They called the 1s and 0s machine language. Still, the work was agonizing. It took lots of 1s and 0s to do just about anything. And strings of numbers are really hard to stare at for hours. So, scientists created another abstraction layer, one that could translate more scrutable instructions into a lot of 1s and 0s. This was called assembly language and it made it possible that a machine language instruction that looks like this: 10110000 01100001 could be written more like this: MOV AL, 61h which looks a little less robotic. Scientists could write this code more easily. Though if you’re like me, it still doesn’t look fun. Soon, scientists engineered more layers, including a popular language called C, on top of assembly language, so they could type in instructions like this: printf(“Hello World”); C translates that into assembly language, which translates into 1s and 0s, which translates into little transistors popping open and closed, which eventually turn on little dots on a computer screen to display the words, “Hello World.” With abstraction, scientists built layers of road which made computer travel faster. It made the act of using computers faster. And new generations of computer programmers didn’t need to be actual scientists. They could use high-level language to make computers do interesting things.* When you fire up a computer, open up a Web browser, and buy a copy of this book online for a friend (please do!), you’re working within a program, a layer that translates your actions into code that another layer, called an operating system (like Windows or Linux or MacOS), can interpret. That operating system is probably built on something like C, which translates to Assembly, which translates to machine language, which flips on and off a gaggle of transistors. (Phew.) So, why am I telling you this? In the same way that driving on pavement makes a road trip faster, and layers of code let you work on a computer faster, hackers like DHH find and build layers of abstraction in business and life that allow them to multiply their effort. I call these layers platforms.

The typewriter is neat and compact and sturdy and blue, just the right machine to pound out a missive of love. When you strike the keys it’s a sound that hasn’t been heard in the qorld world for thirty years (we are so far away from a time when typewriters won world wars). When you strike the keys they make a sound like a pistol shot, a sound so definite and sure you feel like a genius, or an orayor orator, or a beat poet. When you strike the keys you just want to keep on fucking writing. You have to wrestle with the thing, like I am doing now, steer it like an old manual car, keep the words together and right and on the page, but the blood and muscle of a typewriter, it is a beautiful thing.

Oval Window, 1953 - 1957 In 1953 came the first major changes in Beetle styling. Rear view was increasingly a problem and so the boys in Wolfsburg cut out the centre post and made the split into an oval. Some callous butchers are known to have manually cut the center post of the split rear window out either to improve rear visibility or to make their cars look newer! This window stayed in vogue until 1958 with the first small square rear window model. Note that the rear bonnet was the same as the Split, except for minor changes such as handle and ‘popes nose’ designs. Taillights are larger and also oval shaped. Outer lens is GLASS, not plastic and has a distinctive honeycomb pattern. These Bugs also came with pop-up (semaphore) indicators in the b-pillars.

★ BOOK OF THE WEEK ★ SWITCHED FORTUNES John Rabe £7.99 Austin Macauley Making a change from the manuals and the marque history books, this engaging thriller takes on added impetus when the author shares his knowledge of cars with the reader. Author John Rabe is a self-confessed car nut and has written a traditional adventure story around racing driver Kevin Richardson, who gets involved in international intrigue but still manages to put in a good performance on the track. So, rather than just getting in a car and gunning it, we are told: ‘The Subaru’s engine started immediately, the uneven beat of the horizontally opposed flat four cylinder engine was music to the ears.’ Think about the exciting and compelling thriller style of the late Dick Francis, but with cars instead of horses. Great stuff. DB

On August 12, 1933, President Machado fled Cuba with ABC terrorists shooting at his laden airplane as it prepared to take off from the long hot runway. He left Cuba without any continuity of leadership and a smooth transfer of authority to the next administration became impossible in Havana. American envoy, Sumner Welles stepped into the vacuum and encouraged Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada to accept the office of Provisional President of Cuba. Céspedes was a Cuban writer and politician, born in New York City, son of Carlos Manual de Céspedes del Castillo who was a hero of the Cuban War of Independence. Wearing a spotlessly clean, crisp white suit, Céspedes was installed as the Provisional President of Cuba, on what was his 62nd birthday. This expedient political move failed to prevent the violence that broke out in the streets. Mobs looted and behaved with viciousness that lasted for six long hours and created a mayhem not witnessed since Cuba’s Independence from Spain. Students from the university ransacked the previously pro-Machado newspaper “Heraldo de Cuba.” The Presidential Palace was stormed and severely damaged, with the culprits leaving a “For Rent” sign hanging on the front gate. The temperament of the mob that rallied against the Machado supporters, including the hated Porristas who had been left behind, was ferocious. They wounded over 200 hapless souls and cost 21 people their lives. Five members of the Porristas as well as Colonel Antonio Jimenez, the head of Machado’s secret police, were summarily shot to death and trampled upon. The rioters then tied the mutilated body of Jimenez to the top of a car and paraded his bullet-riddled carcass through the streets of Havana, showing it off as a trophy. When the howling throng of incensed people finally dumped him in front of the hospital, it was determined that he had been shot 40 times. Students hammered away at an imposing bronze statue of Machado, until piece by piece it was totally destroyed. Shops owned by the dictator’s friends were looted and smashed, as were the homes of Cabinet members living in the affluent suburbs.

There’s no on-board starter on the car. If you spin and don’t manage to keep the engine running, you have two problems: first, the engine’s stopped, so you’ll need mechanics armed with a pit starter motor to get back in business; second, it’s stuck in whatever gear you were in at the time, and because the gear shift is hydraulically powered, it’s not until the engine is running that you can then go back down through the gears. But, of course, the mechanics can’t start the car in gear, because it would race off away from them. They need to come to the car with a little ratchet spanner and manually rock the car backwards and forwards while working the spanner on the end of the gear-shift barrel until it gets back down to neutral. Only then can they put the starter in and restart the car and off you go again.

You invest so much in it, don't you? It's what elevates you above the beasts of the field, it's what makes you special. Homo sapiens, you call yourself. Wise Man. Do you even know what it is, this consciousness you cite in your own exaltation? Do you even know what it's for? Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe you've forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterwards, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobody's told you that even waking souls are only slaves in denial. Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger. Too late! The electricity's already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self 'chose' to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary—almost an afterthought— to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: it reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other. But it's not in charge. You're not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn't share living space with the likes of you. Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it. Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers. Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift- wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there's no other way? Heuristic software's been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents. Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It's the next logical step. Oh, but you can't. There's something in the way. And it's fighting back.

No keys in the ignition. All the keys are locked away in the main building. Part of how they keep the inhabitants “safe.” Same reason all the cars here are manual transmission, another layer of security, because they assume the inmates can’t drive stick. To be fair, the American ones probably can’t. But the South Africans can.

Finding the Competitive Levers When there’s a battle between two networks, there are competitive levers that shift users from one into the other—what are they? The best place to focus in the rideshare market was the hard side of the network: drivers. More drivers meant that prices would be lower, attracting valuable high-frequency riders that often comparison shop for fares. Attract more riders, and it more efficiently fills the time of drivers, and vice versa. There was a double benefit to moving drivers from a competitor’s network to yours—it would push their network into surging prices while yours would lower in price. Uber’s competitive levers would combine financial incentives—paying up for more sign-ups, more hours—with product improvements to improve Acquisition, Engagement, and Economic forces. Drawing in more drivers through product improvements is straightforward—the better the experience of picking up riders and routing the car to their destination, the more the app would be used. Building a better product is one of the classic levers in the tech industry, but Uber focused much of its effort on targeted bonuses for drivers. Why bonuses? Because for drivers, that was their primary motivation for using the app, and improving their earnings would make them sticky. But these bonuses weren’t just any bonuses—they were targeted at quickly flipping over the most valuable drivers in the networks of Uber’s rivals, targeting so-called dual apping drivers that were active on multiple networks. They were given large, special bonuses that compelled them to stick to Uber, and every hour they drove was an hour that the other networks couldn’t utilize. There was a sophisticated effort to tag drivers as dual appers. Some of these efforts were just manual—Uber employees who took trips would just ask if the drivers drove for other services, and they could mark them manually in a special UI within the app. There were also behavioral signals when drivers were running two apps—they would often pause their Uber session for a few minutes while they drove for another company, then unpause it. On Android, there were direct APIs that could tell if someone was running Uber and Lyft at the same time. Eventually a large number of these signals were fed into a machine learning model where each driver would receive a score based on how likely they were to be a dual apper. It didn’t have to be perfect, just good enough to aid the targeting.

You cannot automate something until you’ve done it manually many times. Control all of the factors and show technology cuts costs. Remember, for many legacy companies, information technology is only a cost center. They only adopted the code. You were born in it, molded by it. A full-stack entrant into a new vertical is formidably protean. You can morph your product just by hitting keys. Tesla’s over-the-air updates for its cars are a fantastic example.

When you place an item in memory, it’s as if you’re sending a message to your future self,” according to Robert Jacobs, a professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. “This channel has limited capacity, however, and thus it can’t transmit all details of a message. Consequently, a message retrieved from memory at a later time may not be the same as the message placed into memory at the earlier time. That is why memory errors occur.” Jacobs conceives of memory as a kind of communication channel which, like all communication channels, may break down. For instance, the brain is designed to favor filling in details when only the gist of an experience can be recalled. Was the Shelby Mustang I considered buying last month outfitted with a manual or an automatic transmission? If I don’t remember, it’s natural to “mentally fill in the missing details with the most frequent or commonplace properties,” says Jacobs. The car must have been equipped with a manual transmission because I don’t think Shelby ever made a car with an automatic transmission, I conclude, although I’m not all that sure of my memory for this fact and this car could be an exception or a conversion. In J. G. Ballard’s dystopian novel Rushing to Paradise, he writes of the dangers of a “collective amnesia for the future. . . . a willed refusal to face the imminent.” Could this failure in future memory be part of the explanation for our response to the threat of Global Warming?

Back in 2016, no one knew what Build, Build, Build meant or what it stood for. Critics had very little expectation of the team. They wagered against our success, not knowing that when they did, they gambled against the future of their country. They were certain that the infrastructure projects would never materialize — that blueprints would remain as drawings. They didn’t expect 6.5 million Filipinos to stand and work behind it. “ - Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo , Night Owl: A Nationbuilder’s Manual 2nd Edition (p. 142, Build, Build, Build Projects CAR Region)

It's not food if it arrived through the window of your car.

Thanks to cars and supermarkets, however, we live in a world with readily available and abundant resources. The body no longer rewards the search for food, at least not with endorphins. In this day and age, we basically get our endorphin hits from exercise or manual labor. With at least one notable exception.

The bus is late. Cars drive by. Rich people n cars never look at people on the street, at all. Poor ones always do ... in fact it sometimes seems they're just driving around, looking at people on the street. I've done that. Poor people wait a lot. Welfare, unemployment lines, laundromats, phone booths, emergency rooms, jails, etc.

His “psychological car” was driven at various times by his inner pusher, his pleaser, his frightened child, and his inner critic, who was always willing to let him know how inadequate he really was.

Jeremy George Lake Charles Sports Car Collector His collection includes several Lamborghinis, including one from the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as a number of other rare models. His collection of 40 cars includes a Porsche 911 GT3 RS, a Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG and a Ferrari 458 Italia. Jeremy George Lake Charles Other cars in his garage include a Ford Mustang, an Aston Martin Vantage, two Porsche 918 Spyders and two Rolls-Royce Phantom IIs. This extraordinary collection of cars included a 1964 Ferrari 488 GTB with Stirling engine and four-speed manual transmission, an original Lotus Elans and an early Ferrari F40. The Boxster is generally a great sports car, but the 718 badge certainly makes it a classic of the future. This collector's car is always the one I see lined up in front of me, and I have seen the owner pull the car out of the car every weekend with a sense of pride. The Type R will probably be a lethal collector's car that we will see for many years to come. He is a collector of cars, which is something I'm not sure what to do. M is for sure it will be in a few years. Jeremy George Lake Charles Another advantage of owning sports cars is that most eventually become collectibles. For the super-rich, though, there are some amazing car collections on the list of collectibles, but I can't remember all of them for that long. It should come as no surprise, then, that Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the owner of the world's largest collection of sports cars, has 7,000 cars, including cars from brands such as Ferrari, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, BMW and Porsche. Sheik Mohammed has taken 19 years to sort through his entire collection because he has to drive different cars every day from now on.

Professor Michael Porter of Harvard Business School asserts: “Once a company achieves competitive advantage through an innovation, it can sustain it only through relentless improvement. Almost any advantage can be imitated.” He adds, “Ultimately, the only way to sustain competitive advantage is to upgrade it—to move to more sophisticated types. This is precisely what Japanese auto-makers have done. They initially penetrated foreign markets with small, inexpensive compact cars of adequate quality and competed on the basis of lower labor costs. Even while their labor-cost advantage persisted, however, the Japanese companies were upgrading. . . .

When he speaks to students, he suggests they adopt the mindset of someone who is picking one car for the rest of their lives. How would they treat it? They would read the manual carefully, change the oil twice as often and clean up the rust spots. Well, each of us gets one mind and one body for life. How will you treat yours?

Imagine a genie comes to a 17 year old and offers to get him any car he wants. However, there is one catch – whatever car he chooses he must make it last a lifetime. Well, you can imagine that the young man would read the owner’s manual 10 times, would change the oil twice as often as suggested, etc. to help that car last 50 years. In the same way, Buffett continued, we each receive one body and one mind for a lifetime. You cannot repair them at age 60. You must maintain them. One’s greatest asset is one’s self. Develop your mind and good health habits when you are young, and it will enhance your life. If not, you may have a wreck at age 70.

A MANUAL! I like manuals. Luckily for me, most things come with one. Your car came with a manual. So did your TV and your Crock-Pot. Last week, I actually bought an eyeliner manual. You know, because, really, I’m just making that up as I go too. When it comes to parenting, there are a lot of great books out there. But MomStrong moms are looking for more than advice—we’re looking for wisdom. And God tells us that the beginning of wisdom is found in knowing the Lord (see Psalm 111:10). The way we find out what

It’s easy to think that if we had a different house, different car, different job, different relationship, different city, everything would be different; that we would feel different then. The problem is, you are the main character in the story that is your life. No matter how much you alter the setting of that story, you can’t escape from yourself. There are many factors which contribute to your experience on this planet, but ultimately, you are the one creating your experience here. In order to get to the life you are here to live, you must begin by becoming the person you are here to become.

Our nation isn’t just a severed hand, a mutilated grandmother, three dead girls in a basement, embarrassment for a minister, trillions of debt, a double suicide at the railway station and a fatal five-car crash by the coast.