Nylons Quotes

One moment, she was wearing clothing, and the next moment, she was wearing a bikini. Fifty percent of the world was brown skin and fifty percent was orange nylon. From the Mona Lisa smile on Orla's lips, it was clear she was pleased to finally be allowed to demonstrate her true talents. A tiny part of Gansey's brain said: You have been staring for too long. The larger part of his brain said: ORANGE.

I have loved you woman as surely as I have named you rust and sand and nylon.

Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.

Slowly, it came into focus. This small web of people keeping one another afloat. All these minuscule interactions- a friendly wave, a pencil sketch, some plastic beads strung up a nylon cord- they might not look like much from the outside, but for the people caught inside that web? They might be everything, the very tethers that keep one bound to this planet.

What I saw had no solidity, it was all made of mist and nylon, with nothing behind.

The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anynymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.

They had come for us in the night. Hey had come expecting a lot of blood. They had come with all their gear. Their rubber overshoes and their nylon bodysuits. Their knives, their hammer, their bag of nails. They had come to do a job on us, like they'd done on Morrison and his wife.

The industrialist was horrified to find the fisherman lying beside his boat, smoking a pipe. -  Why aren’t you fishing?, said the industrialist. -  Because I have caught enough fish for the day. -  Why don’t you catch some more? -  What would I do with them? -  Earn more money. Then you could have a motor fixed to your boat and go into deeper waters and catch more fish. That would bring you money to buy nylon nets, so more fish, more money. Soon you would have enough to buy two boats even a fleet of boats. Then you could be rich like me. - What would I do then? -  Then you could sit back and enjoy life. -  What do you think I’m doing now?

She didn’t drink a lot, but she drank me into wonderland where we spent the time giggling and laughing. However, know this if you are able or leave while you still can. Love is unstable when built on what must come and go with the wind and sand. After a while, I heard the increasing activity from the hall as the campus was starting to come alive and I said to Penny, “I think we need to get to the bistro” and she responded by slipping one brown shoe delicately over her white nylon stocking.

She always says I'm the best friend that she's ever had... how do you hang up on someone who needs you that bad? ~From 'Laura' on The Nylon Curtain

I stared at Buddy while he unzipped his chino pants and took them off and laid them on a chair and then took off his underpants that were made of something like nylon fishnet. “They’re cool,” he explained, “and my mother says they wash easily.” Then he just stood there in front of me and I kept on staring at him. The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed. Buddy seemed hurt I didn’t say anything.

The rope connecting two men on a mountain is more than nylon protection; it is an organic thing that transmits subtle messages of intent and disposition from man to man; it is an extension of the tactile senses, a psychological bond, a wire along which currents of communication flow.

WHAT YOU WON’T FIND IN HER CLOSET * Three-inch heels. Why live life halfway? * Logos. You are not a billboard. * Nylon, polyester, viscose and vinyl will make you sweaty, smelly and shiny. * Sweatpants. No man should ever see you in those. Except your gym teacher – and even then. Leggings are tolerated. * Blingy jeans with embroidery and holes in them. They belong to Bollywood. * UGG boots. Enough said.

I stared at Buddy while he unzipped his chino pants and took them off and laid them on a chair and then took off his underpants that were made of something like nylon fishnet. ‘They’re cool,’ he explained, ‘and my mother says they wash easily.

Between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon, I broke into a total of six offices, one penthouse suite and a small bank, and cursed them all. I cursed the stones they were built on, the bricks in their walls, the paint on their ceilings, the carpets on their floors. I cursed the nylon chairs to give their owners little electric shocks, I cursed the markers to squeak on the whiteboard, the hinges to rust, the glass to run, the windows to stick, the fans to whir, the chairs to break, the computers to crash, the papers to crease, the pens to smear; I cursed the pipes to leak, the coolers to drip, the pictures to sag, the phones to crackle and the wires to spark. And we enjoyed it.

These cities grew in approximately the same places as our cities do now, however different the shape of the continents was. There was even a New York that in some way resembled the New York familiar to all of you, but was much newer, or, rather, more awash with new products, new toothbrushes, a New York with its own Manhattan that stretched out dense with skyscrapers gleaming like the nylon bristles of a brand-new toothbrush.

The family which takes its mauve an cerise, air-conditioned, power-steered and power-braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, lighted buildings, billboards and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground. They pass on into countryside that has been rendered largely invisible by commercial art. (The goods which the latter advertise have an absolute priority in our value system. Such aesthetic considerations as a view of the countryside accordingly come second. On such matters we are consistent.) They picnic on exquisitely packaged food from a portable icebox by a polluted stream and go on to spend the night at a park which is a menace to public health and morals. Just before dozing off on an air mattress, beneath a nylon tent, amid the stench of decaying refuse, they may reflect vaguely on the curious unevenness of their blessings. Is this, indeed, the American genius?

What you call love was invented by guys like me... to sell Nylons

El Chico de las Estrellas cogió un alfiler de libertad que clavó al nylon que oprimía sus labios. Empezó a pasar aquella aguja por los puntos de su boca y con cada lágrima se deshacía un nudo.

He knew the terrible tales of sea otters choking on polyethylene rings from beer six-packs; of swans and gulls strangled by nylon nets and fishing lines; of a green sea turtle in Hawaii dead with a pocket comb, a foot of nylon rope, and a toy truck wheel lodged in its gut. His personal worst

Avery turned and smiled. “There’s a huge party tonight, and you’re invited. We’re celebrating New Year’s in style.” I looked down at my sling. “I don’t know. Navy-blue nylon isn’t exactly a trend.

The year was 1987, but it might as well have been the Summer of Love: I was twenty, had hair down to my shoulders, and was dressed like an Indian rickshaw driver. For those charged with enforcing our nation’s drug laws, it would have been only prudent to subject my luggage to special scrutiny. Happily, I had nothing to hide. “Where are you coming from?” the officer asked, glancing skeptically at my backpack. “India, Nepal, Thailand…” I said. “Did you take any drugs while you were over there?” As it happens, I had. The temptation to lie was obvious—why speak to a customs officer about my recent drug use? But there was no real reason not to tell the truth, apart from the risk that it would lead to an even more thorough search of my luggage (and perhaps of my person) than had already commenced. “Yes,” I said. The officer stopped searching my bag and looked up. “Which drugs did you take? “I smoked pot a few times… And I tried opium in India.” “Opium?” “Yes.” “Opium or heroin? “It was opium.” “You don’t hear much about opium these days.” “I know. It was the first time I’d ever tried it.” “Are you carrying any drugs with you now?” “No.” The officer eyed me warily for a moment and then returned to searching my bag. Given the nature of our conversation, I reconciled myself to being there for a very long time. I was, therefore, as patient as a tree. Which was a good thing, because the officer was now examining my belongings as though any one item—a toothbrush, a book, a flashlight, a bit of nylon cord—might reveal the deepest secrets of the universe. “What is opium like?” he asked after a time. And I told him. In fact, over the next ten minutes, I told this lawman almost everything I knew about the use of mind-altering substances. Eventually he completed his search and closed my luggage. One thing was perfectly obvious at the end of our encounter: We both felt very good about it.

And I liked the sound of the rain pounding with fury against the thin nylon umbrella, and the glass-like shatter of the waves hurling themselves at the rocky shore. It was all violence and temper, all passion. It made me feel human to sit there in the middle of it all and let nature batter me into feeling something.

Do you think that I have a problem?" Ignatius bellowed. "The only problem that those people have anyway is that they don't like new cars and hairsprays. That why they are put away. They make the other members of the society fearful. Every asylum in this nation is filled with poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane, plastic, television, and subdivisions." "Ignatius, that ain't true. You remember old Mr. Becnel used to live down the block? They locked him up because he was running down the street naked." "Of course he was running down the street naked. His skin could not bear any more of that Dacron and nylon clothing that was clogging his pores. I've always considered Mr Becnel one of the martyrs of our age. The poor man was badly victimized. Now run along to the front door and see if my taxi has arrived." p.306

By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor...

Caffeine is made of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen: the same as cocaine, thalidomide, nylon, TNT and heroin.

The woman had been sophisticated. She had even been wearing nylons.

I’m sure it was real but it resembled one of those cheap wigs worn by department-store mannequins, jet black and as glossy as nylon. It didn’t seem to belong to her head.

Menschen spalteten das Atom und erfanden Fernsehen, Nylon und löslichen Kaffee, bevor sie das Alter ihres eigenen Planeten herausgefunden hatten.

My new nylons rubbed pleasantly against my thighs.

In the days of the Romance Run, each time you went back to the same whorehouses and you brought nylons to your favorite girls.

Oh Susan!" said Jill, "she's interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up.

Oh Susan!” said Jill. “She’s interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up.

I’d like to see how long an Aroostook County man can stand Florida. The trouble is that with his savings moved and invested there, he can’t very well go back. His dice are rolled and can’t be picked up again. But I do wonder if a down-Easter, sitting on a nylon-and-aluminum chair out on a changelessly green lawn slapping mosquitoes in the evening of a Florida October—I do wonder if the stab of memory doesn’t strike him high in the stomach just below the ribs where it hurts. And in the humid ever-summer I dare his picturing mind not to go back to the shout of color, to the clean rasp of frosty air, to the smell of pine wood burning and the caressing warmth of kitchens. For how can one know color in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness?

Hiro's father, who was stationed in Japan for many years, was obsessed with cameras. He kept bringing them back from his stints in the Far East, encased in many protective layers, so that when he took them out to show Hiro, it was like watching an exquisite striptease as they emerged from all that black leather and nylon, zippers and straps. And once the lens was finally exposed, pure geometric equation made real, so powerful and vulnerable at once, Hiro could only think it was like nuzzling through skirts and lingerie and outer labia and inner labia ... It made him feel naked and weak and brave.

The building was crowded with men and women packing stuff into boxes and bags, leather stuff, nylon, canvas, and rubber stuff, with brass rings and silver chains, steel buckles and studded straps. Elephant stuff.

Frost lurched away, gagging. The nude man hung upside down, his ankles bound with orange nylon cord. Like a pig carcass hanging in a slaughterhouse, his abdomen had been sliced open, the cavity stripped of all organs. Both arms

The Mesmesrizer turns around, facing the woman and glancing at her uniform with golden lines that run along her curves. She must love her uniform—majestic and powerful. He can smell its colors and the fabric: 100% solid, no hologram, no color-changing particles, but not natural enough. He can still smell that 5% polyester with 15% nylon. “Please, Vellariya,” he says, gesturing with his hand as if offering the floor to the performer, also ignoring that he is still naked after the shower.

Joel arrived at Hemmant beach in a pair of white nylon shorts. He knew they'd be see-through once they were wet, and he deliberately didn't wear any underwear, because he wanted to be in the surf, practically naked, and have people looking at him.

I used to take my morning tea at her kiosk and I took an interest in what she was doing. I later learnt she was taking care of her grandchildren. Sadly, she was taken ill and had to close her nylon-walled smoky shack. But all the wit and cunning of the character came from her.

Have you seen a person recently so delicious-looking that, were you and this person to be scrambling for ice-cream change with your arms in the sofa and your faces laid on the cushions looking at each other as you felt for coins and the ice-cream truck dinged on by and your hands in there felt only the lint of the sofa scrofula and your faces were fairly close across a distance of that knobby nylon terrain, you might feel compelled to slide you face toward this delicious-looking person’s and kiss him or her - have you seen anyone like this recently?

Tube Three women opposite talk about the weather as if it's a friend they don't much like. "And that's another thing," says one, leaning in. "My no-tights-till-October rule has gone straight out the window." Her companions bob their heads, uncross and recross their nylon-clad legs.

Arthur said brightly, “Actually I quite liked it.” Ford turned and gaped. Here was an approach that had quite simply not occurred to him. The Vogon raised a surprised eyebrow that effectively obscured his nose and was therefore no bad thing. “Oh good …” he whirred, in considerable astonishment. “Oh yes,” said Arthur, “I thought that some of the metaphysical imagery was really particularly effective.” Ford continued to stare at him, slowly organizing his thoughts around this totally new concept. Were they really going to be able to bareface their way out of this? “Yes, do continue …” invited the Vogon. “Oh … and, er … interesting rhythmic devices too,” continued Arthur, “which seemed to counterpoint the … er … er …” he floundered. Ford leaped to his rescue, hazarding “… counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor of the … er …” He floundered too, but Arthur was ready again. “… humanity of the …” “Vogonity,” Ford hissed at him. “Ah yes, Vogonity—sorry—of the poet’s compassionate soul”—Arthur felt he was on the homestretch now—“which contrives through the medium of the verse structure to sublimate this, transcend that, and come to terms with the fundamental dichotomies of the other”—he was reaching a triumphant crescendo—“and one is left with a profound and vivid insight into … into … er …” (which suddenly gave out on him). Ford leaped in with the coup de grace: “Into whatever it was the poem was about!” he yelled. Out of the corner of his mouth: “Well done, Arthur, that was very good.” The Vogon perused them. For a moment his embittered racial soul had been touched, but he thought no—too little too late. His voice took on the quality of a cat snagging brushed nylon. “So what you’re saying is that I write poetry because underneath my mean callous heartless exterior I really just want to be loved,” he said. He paused, “Is that right?” Ford laughed a nervous laugh. “Well, I mean, yes,” he said, “don’t we all, deep down, you know … er …” The Vogon stood up. “No, well, you’re completely wrong,” he said, “I just write poetry to throw my mean callous heartless exterior into sharp relief. I’m going to throw you off the ship anyway. Guard! Take the prisoners to number three airlock and throw them out!” “What?” shouted Ford. A huge young Vogon guard stepped forward and yanked them out of their straps with his huge blubbery arms. “You can’t throw us into space,” yelled Ford, “we’re trying to write a book.” “Resistance is useless!” shouted the Vogon guard back at him. It was the first phrase he’d learned when he joined the Vogon Guard Corps.

நட-ஓடாதே!’ என்கிற வென்ச்சர்ஸ் கிதார் வாத்ய கோஷ்டியின் இசைத் தட்டு அது.

PASTOR- Mi nombre verdadero es Juan. Poca cosa, ¿verdad? ¡Pero humano, señor, humano! Millares de Juanes han escrito libros y han plantado árboles. Millones de mujeres han dicho alguna vez en cualquier rincón del mundo <>. En cambio, ¿quién ha querido nunca al <>? Juan sabe a pueblo y a eternidad: es el hierro, la madera de roble, el pan de trigo. <> es el nylon.

The zipper hung, caught, as he opened the French fatigues, the coils of toothed nylon clotted with salt. He broke it, some tiny metal parts shooting off against the wall of salt-rotten cloth gave, then was in her, effecting the transmission of the old message. Here, even here, in a place he knew for what it was, a coded model of some stranger's memory, the drive held.

The atomic scientists had become important people. That was their first discovery when they returned from their laboratories to the world at large. “Before the war we were supposed to be completely ignorant of the world and inexperienced in its ways. But now we are regarded as the ultimate authorities on all possible subjects, from nylon stockings to the best for of international organisation.

The room was empty, aside from the wide pink bedslab and two nylon bags, new and identical, that lay beside it. Blank walls, no windows, a single white-painted steel firedoor. The walls were coated with countless layers of white latex paint. Factory space. He knew this kind of room, this kind of building; the tenants would operate in the interzone where art wasn't quite crime, crime not quite art.

The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor. But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary … You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals. You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs. My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference? That is the magic that exchange and specialisation have wrought for the human species.

He unzipped the nylon case, and inside was a discolored frame that smelled like smoke. A thin layer of soot covered the painting under the glass- a picture of an old manor house. Gothic Victorian. Wisteria climbed the wall near the entrance, the pale-lavender blossoms clinging to the gray stone. The artist had brushed flowers below the windows as well, though those colors had been muted by the smoke damage.

seat, which forced him to drive through town straight backed, like a man in a perpetual state of alarm. “Some people think clothes do something for them, I thought I did something for clothes,” he told me. “I was cocky, in other words.” Joseph spent his earnings from summer jobs on a wardrobe for high school that included tailor-made slacks and nylon underwear from Paris, which he bought from Rubenstein Brothers on Canal Street.

That transactions at the market, at the rice seller, in the narrow archways of the gold bazaar were belaboured exchanges of tuts and hisses, whispered offers with lowered eyes, counter-offers protested while patting empty wallets in pockets. That upon agreeing a suitable price, buyer and seller would shake hands three times, reach into stashes of tightly rolled banknotes tucked into nylon socks and secret compartments hand-sewn into underpants.

The shuriken had always fascinated him, steel stars with knife-sharp points. Some were chromed, others black, others treated with a rainbow surface like oil on water. But the chrome stars held his gaze. They were mounted against scarlet ultrasuede with nearly invisible loops of nylon fishline, their centers stamped with dragons or yinyang symbols. They caught the street’s neon and twisted it, and it came to Case that these were the stars under which he voyaged, his destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome.

So, by the late eighteenth century scientists knew very precisely the shape and dimensions of the Earth and its distance from the Sun and planets; and now Cavendish, without even leaving home, had given them its weight. So you might think that determining the age of the Earth would be relatively straightforward. After all, the necessary materials were literally at their feet. But no. Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.

No one was a stranger in that crowd. We had all heard FDR's "Fireside Chats" and Edward R. Murrow's "This is London," listened to H.V. Kaltenborn for the evening news, and watched the newsreels before the movies. We'd read Ernie Pyle's columns, planted victory gardens, written V mails, sent care packages, gathered phonograph records for the USO, given up nylon for parachutes, saved bacon grease for explosives, and turned in tin foil, saved from gum wrappers, for ammunition. Most of all, we'd prayed that our loved ones would be safe.

Pois é, sou do tempo em que mulher desquitada era puta, rir na Sexta-Feira da Paixão era proibido, mas podia fumar no cinema. Mulher magra era feio, usavam meia nylon de fio, cinta-liga, anágua, sutiã pontudo e saia e blusa de banlon. Mostrar o joelho era audacioso, raro ver uma mulher dirigindo carro, top models eram as misses, proibido mulher no estribo do bonde, cabelo liso não, permanente sim, as desconfortáveis toalhinhas de menstruação, blush chamava-se rouge, o território era de Rorãima, yoga era yóga e no futebol escanteio era corner.

The fanciest grade of green tea in Japan goes by the name of gyokuro, meaning "jade dew." It consists of the newest leaves of a tea plantation's oldest tea bushes that bud in May and have been carefully protected from the sun under a double canopy of black nylon mesh. The leaves are then either steeped in boiled water or ground into a powder to make matcha (literally, "grind tea"), the thick tea served at a tea ceremony. (The powder used to make the thin tea served at a tea ceremony comes from grinding the older leaves of young tea plants, resulting in a more bitter-tasting tea.) The middle grade of green tea is called sencha, or "brew tea," and is made from the unprotected young tea leaves that unfurl in May or June. The leaves are usually steeped in hot water to yield a fragrant grassy brew to enjoy on special occasions or in fancy restaurants. For everyday tea, the Japanese buy bancha. Often containing tiny tea twigs, it consists of the large, coarse, unprotected leaves that remain on the tea bush until August. When these leaves are roasted, they become a popular tea called hojicha. When hojicha combines with popped roasted brown rice, a tea called genmaicha results.

...for a piece of famous fluffiness that doesn't just pretend about what real lives can be like, but moves on into one of the world's least convincing pretences about what people themselves are like, consider the teased and coiffed nylon monument that is 'Imagine': surely the My Little Pony of philosophical statements. John and Yoko all in white, John at the white piano, John drifting through the white rooms of a white mansion, and all the while the sweet drivel flowing. Imagine there's no heaven. Imagine there's no hell. Imagine all the people, living life in - hello? Excuse me? Take religion out of the picture, and everybody spontaneously starts living life in peace? I don't know about you, but in my experience peace is not the default state of human beings, any more than having an apartment the size of Joey and Chandler's is. Peace is not the state of being we return to, like water running downhill, whenever there's nothing external to perturb us. Peace between people is an achievement, a state of affairs we put together effortfully in the face of competing interests, and primate dominance dynamics, and our evolved tendency to cease our sympathies at the boundaries of our tribe.

Part of what kept him standing in the restive group of men awaiting authorization to enter the airport was a kind of paralysis that resulted from Sylvanshine’s reflecting on the logistics of getting to the Peoria 047 REC—the issue of whether the REC sent a van for transfers or whether Sylvanshine would have to take a cab from the little airport had not been conclusively resolved—and then how to arrive and check in and where to store his three bags while he checked in and filled out his arrival and Post-code payroll and withholding forms and orientational materials then somehow get directions and proceed to the apartment that Systems had rented for him at government rates and get there in time to find someplace to eat that was either in walking distance or would require getting another cab—except the telephone in the alleged apartment wasn’t connected yet and he considered the prospects of being able to hail a cab from outside an apartment complex were at best iffy, and if he told the original cab he’d taken to the apartment to wait for him, there would be difficulties because how exactly would he reassure the cabbie that he really was coming right back out after dropping his bags and doing a quick spot check of the apartment’s condition and suitability instead of it being a ruse designed to defraud the driver of his fare, Sylvanshine ducking out the back of the Angler’s Cove apartment complex or even conceivably barricading himself in the apartment and not responding to the driver’s knock, or his ring if the apartment had a doorbell, which his and Reynolds’s current apartment in Martinsburg most assuredly did not, or the driver’s queries/threats through the apartment door, a scam that resided in Claude Sylvanshine’s awareness only because a number of independent Philadelphia commercial carriage operators had proposed heavy Schedule C losses under the proviso ‘Losses Through Theft of Service’ and detailed this type of scam as prevalent on the poorly typed or sometimes even handwritten attachments required to explain unusual or specific C-deductions like this, whereas were Sylvanshine to pay the fare and the tip and perhaps even a certain amount in advance on account so as to help assure the driver of his honorable intentions re the second leg of the sojourn there was no tangible guarantee that the average taxi driver—a cynical and ethically marginal species, hustlers, as even their smudged returns’ very low tip-income-vs.-number-of-fares-in-an-average-shift ratios in Philly had indicated—wouldn’t simply speed away with Sylvanshine’s money, creating enormous hassles in terms of filling out the internal forms for getting a percentage of his travel per diem reimbursed and also leaving Sylvanshine alone, famished (he was unable to eat before travel), phoneless, devoid of Reynolds’s counsel and logistical savvy in the sterile new unfurnished apartment, his stomach roiling in on itself in such a way that it would be all Sylvanshine could do to unpack in any kind of half-organized fashion and get to sleep on the nylon travel pallet on the unfinished floor in the possible presence of exotic Midwest bugs, to say nothing of putting in the hour of CPA exam review he’d promised himself this morning when he’d overslept slightly and then encountered last-minute packing problems that had canceled out the firmly scheduled hour of morning CPA review before one of the unmarked Systems vans arrived to take him and his bags out through Harpers Ferry and Ball’s Bluff to the airport, to say even less about any kind of systematic organization and mastery of the voluminous Post, Duty, Personnel, and Systems Protocols materials he should be receiving promptly after check-in and forms processing at the Post, which any reasonable Personnel Director would expect a new examiner to have thoroughly internalized before reporting for the first actual day interacting with REC examiners, and which there was no way in any real world that Sylvanshine could expect

There was someone sitting in his room, over on that chair— “Are you kidding me?” He exhaled a curse and rubbed the back of his brain. “Really? Are you fucking kidding me?” Across the way, like some fucked-up scarecrow, a pair of blue jeans, that Nirvana concert T-shirt of the angel’s, the flannel bullshit, and a set of Nikes had been stuffed with God only knew what. The head of the “Lassiter” was made out of a nylon bag that had had potatoes in it, and the black and yellow hair was a collection of knee-high business socks—probably Butch’s—and Swiffer cleaning rags that had been safety pinned in place. Around its neck? A handwritten sign that read: the boss was here.

Inexpensive Progress Encase your legs in nylons, Bestride your hills with pylons O age without a soul; Away with gentle willows And all the elmy billows That through your valleys roll. Let's say goodbye to hedges And roads with grassy edges And winding country lanes; Let all things travel faster Where motor car is master Till only Speed remains. Destroy the ancient inn-signs But strew the roads with tin signs 'Keep Left,' 'M4,' 'Keep Out!' Command, instruction, warning, Repetitive adorning The rockeried roundabout; For every raw obscenity Must have its small 'amenity,' Its patch of shaven green, And hoardings look a wonder In banks of floribunda With floodlights in between. Leave no old village standing Which could provide a landing For aeroplanes to roar, But spare such cheap defacements As huts with shattered casements Unlived-in since the war. Let no provincial High Street Which might be your or my street Look as it used to do, But let the chain stores place here Their miles of black glass facia And traffic thunder through. And if there is some scenery, Some unpretentious greenery, Surviving anywhere, It does not need protecting For soon we'll be erecting A Power Station there. When all our roads are lighted By concrete monsters sited Like gallows overhead, Bathed in the yellow vomit Each monster belches from it, We'll know that we are dead.

Mungo stood on the threshold to Mrs McConnachie’s living room. He hadn’t been invited inside yet. The settee had six of the boys from the builder’s yard crammed on to it. They were packed thigh to thigh and spilled over the arms of the small sofa. In their nylon tracksuits they looked like so many plastic bags all stuffed together; a flammable, noisy jumble of colour-blocking and sponsorship logos. There was the manic throb of techno coming from the stereo; someone had a bootlegged copy of a Carl Cox set from Rezerection. It sounded like the DJ was pressing an early warning siren over a stuttering breakbeat. It was so aggressive sounding – it moved so fast – that it made Mungo feel tense.

A sensual lifestyle defies the productivist logic, it has time. I love this illustration by Anthony DeMello: A rich entrepreneur from the North was horrified to find the southern fisherman lying lazily besides his boat, smoking pipe. “Why aren’t you out fishing?” said the entrepreneur. “Because I have caught enough fish for the day,” said the fisherman. “Why don’t you catch some more?” “What would I do with them?” “You could earn more money,” was the entrepreneur’s reply. “With that you could have a motor fixed to your boat and go into deeper waters and catch more fish. Then you would make enough to buy nylon nets. These would bring you more fish and more money. Soon you would have more money to own two boats... maybe even a fleet of boats. Then you would be a rich man like me.” “What would I do then?” asked the fisherman. “Then you could really enjoy life.” “What do you think I’m doing right now?

By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.

They'll be coming for you, Mr. Jones. They'll be coming any moment now. I hate to say this, but I must. It is my duty to warn you what will happen to you, an enemy spy. You'll be tortured, Mr. Jones—not simply everyday tortures like pulling out your teeth and toe-nails, but unspeakable tortures I can't mention with Miss Ellison here—and then you'll finish in the gas chambers. If you're still alive.' Mary clutched his arm. 'Would they—would they really do that?' 'Good God, no!' Smith stared at her in genuine surprise. 'What on earth would they want to do that for?' He raised his voice again: 'You'll die in a screaming agony, Mr. Jones, an agony beyond your wildest nightmares. And you'll take a long time dying. Hours. Maybe days. And screaming. Screaming all the time.' 'What in God's name am I to do?' The desperate voice from above was no longer quavering, it vibrated like a broken bed-spring. 'What can I do?' 'You can slide down that rope,' Smith said brutally. 'Fifteen feet. Fifteen little feet, Mr. Jones. My God, you could do that in a pole vault.' 'I can't.' The voice was a wail. 'I simply can't.' 'Yes, you can,' Smith urged. 'Grab the rope now, close your eyes, out over the sill and down. Keep your eyes closed. We can catch you.' 'I can't! I can't!' 'Oh God!' Smith said despairingly. 'Oh, my God! It's too late now.' 'It's too—what in heaven's name do you mean?' 'The lights are going on along the passage, Smith said, his voice low and tense. 'And that window. And the next. They're coming for you, Mr. Jones, they're coming now. Oh God, when they strip you off and strap you down on the torture table—' Two seconds later Carnaby-Jones was over the sill and sliding down the nylon rope. His eyes were screwed tightly shut. Mary said, admiringly: You really are the most fearful liar ever.' 'Schaffer keeps telling me the same thing,' Smith admitted. 'You can't all be wrong.

DuPont, for 130 years, had confined itself to making munitions and explosives. In the mid-1920s it then organized its first research efforts in other areas, one of them the brand-new field of polymer chemistry, which the Germans had pioneered during World War I. For several years there were no results at all. Then, in 1928, an assistant left a burner on over the weekend. On Monday morning, Wallace H. Carothers, the chemist in charge, found that the stuff in the kettle had congealed into fibers. It took another ten years before DuPont found out how to make Nylon intentionally. The point of the story is, however, that the same accident had occurred several times in the laboratories of the big German chemical companies with the same results, and much earlier. The Germans were, of course, looking for a polymerized fiber—and they could have had it, along with world leadership in the chemical industry, ten years before DuPont had Nylon. But because they had not planned the experiment, they dismissed its results, poured out the accidentally produced fibers, and started all over again.

I always had trouble with the feet of Jón the First, or Pre-Jón, as I called him later. He would frequently put them in front of me in the evening and tell me to take off his socks and rub his toes, soles, heels and calves. It was quite impossible for me to love these Icelandic men's feet that were shaped like birch stumps, hard and chunky, and screaming white as the wood when the bark is stripped from it. Yes, and as cold and damp, too. The toes had horny nails that resembled dead buds in a frosty spring. Nor can I forget the smell, for malodorous feet were very common in the post-war years when men wore nylon socks and practically slept in their shoes. How was it possible to love these Icelandic men? Who belched at the meal table and farted constantly. After four Icelandic husbands and a whole load of casual lovers I had become a vrai connaisseur of flatulence, could describe its species and varieties in the way that a wine-taster knows his wines. The howling backfire, the load, the gas bomb and the Luftwaffe were names I used most. The coffee belch and the silencer were also well-known quantities, but the worst were the date farts, a speciality of Bæring of Westfjord. Icelandic men don’t know how to behave: they never have and never will, but they are generally good fun. At least, Icelandic women think so. They seem to come with this inner emergency box, filled with humour and irony, which they always carry around with them and can open for useful items if things get too rough, and it must be a hereditary gift of the generations. Anyone who loses their way in the mountains and gets snowed in or spends the whole weekend stuck in a lift can always open this special Icelandic emergency box and get out of the situation with a good story. After wandering the world and living on the Continent I had long tired of well-behaved, fart-free gentlemen who opened the door and paid the bills but never had a story to tell and were either completely asexual or demanded skin-burning action until the morning light. Swiss watch salesmen who only knew of “sechs” as their wake-up hour, or hairy French apes who always required their twelve rounds of screwing after the six-course meal. I suppose I liked German men the best. They were a suitable mixture of belching northerner and cultivated southerner, of orderly westerner and crazy easterner, but in the post-war years they were of course broken men. There was little you could do with them except try to put them right first. And who had the time for that? Londoners are positive and jolly, but their famous irony struck me as mechanical and wearisome in the long run. As if that irony machine had eaten away their real essence. The French machine, on the other hand, is fuelled by seriousness alone, and the Frogs can drive you beyond the limit when they get going with their philosophical noun-dropping. The Italian worships every woman like a queen until he gets her home, when she suddenly turns into a slut. The Yank is one hell of a guy who thinks big: he always wants to take you the moon. At the same time, however, he is as smug and petty as the meanest seamstress, and has a fit if someone eats his peanut butter sandwich aboard the space shuttle. I found Russians interesting. In fact they were the most Icelandic of all: drank every glass to the bottom and threw themselves into any jollity, knew countless stories and never talked seriously unless at the bottom of the bottle, when they began to wail for their mother who lived a thousand miles away but came on foot to bring them their clean laundry once a month. They were completely crazy and were better athletes in bed than my dear countrymen, but in the end I had enough of all their pommel-horse routines. Nordic men are all as tactless as Icelanders. They get drunk over dinner, laugh loudly and fart, eventually start “singing” even in public restaurants where people have paid to escape the tumult of

Helene was a person who had never been able to ask for help, and she couldn't ask for help now. She turned north and started walking toward her home, many miles away in San Rafael. It took her almost eight hours to reach there. After a short time her feet began to hurt, so she took off the heels and throw them away. As she walked on, her nylons tore and her feet began to bleed. She passed buildings that had collapsed, stumbled over rubble, waded through streets filled with filthy water from the fire-fighting efforts. Dirty, sweaty, and disheveled, she walked down the Marina to the Golden Gate Bridge and crossed it into the next county. She reached her home sometime after midnight and knocked on her own front door. It was opened by her fiance, who had never before seen her with her hair uncombed. Without a word, he took her into his arms, kicked the door closed, covered her dirty, tearstained face with kisses, and made love to her right there on the floor. Helene is a very intelligent person but she could not understand why she had never met this ardent lover before. When she asked him, he said simply, 'I was always afraid of smearing your lipstick.' She tells me that now when she begins to relapse into her former perfectionism, she remembers the look of love in her fiance's eyes when he opened the door. She had been looked at by men all of her life but she had never seen that expression in a man's eyes before. At the heart of any real intimacy is a certain vulnerability. It is hard to trust someone with your vulnerability unless you can see in them a matching vulnerability and know that you will not be judged. In some basic way it is our imperfections and even our pain that draws others close to us.

The world recoiled in horror in 2012 when 20 Connecticut schoolchildren and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School. . . . The weapon was a Bushmaster AR-15 semiautomatic rifle adapted from its original role as a battlefield weapon. The AR-15, which is designed to inflict maximum casualties with rapid bursts, should never have been available for purchase by civilians (emphasis added).1 —New York Times editorial, March 4, 2016 Assault weapons were banned for 10 years until Congress, in bipartisan obeisance to the gun lobby, let the law lapse in 2004. As a result, gun manufacturers have been allowed to sell all manner of war weaponry to civilians, including the super destructive .50-caliber sniper rifle. . . .(emphasis added)2 —New York Times editorial, December 11, 2015 [James Holmes the Aurora, Colorado Batman Movie Theater Shooter] also bought bulletproof vests and other tactical gear” (emphasis added).3 —New York Times, July 22, 2012 It is hard to debate guns if you don’t know much about the subject. But it is probably not too surprising that gun control advocates who live in New York City know very little about guns. Semi-automatic guns don’t fire “rapid bursts” of bullets. The New York Times might be fearful of .50-caliber sniper rifles, but these bolt-action .50-caliber rifles were never covered by the federal assault weapons ban. “Urban assault vests” may sound like they are bulletproof, but they are made of nylon. These are just a few of the many errors that the New York Times made.4 If it really believes that it has a strong case, it wouldn’t feel the need to constantly hype its claims. What distinguishes the New York Times is that it doesn’t bother running corrections for these errors.

EVEN BEFORE HE GOT ELECTROCUTED, Jason was having a rotten day. He woke in the backseat of a school bus, not sure where he was, holding hands with a girl he didn’t know. That wasn’t necessarily the rotten part. The girl was cute, but he couldn’t figure out who she was or what he was doing there. He sat up and rubbed his eyes, trying to think. A few dozen kids sprawled in the seats in front of him, listening to iPods, talking, or sleeping. They all looked around his age…fifteen? Sixteen? Okay, that was scary. He didn’t know his own age. The bus rumbled along a bumpy road. Out the windows, desert rolled by under a bright blue sky. Jason was pretty sure he didn’t live in the desert. He tried to think back…the last thing he remembered… The girl squeezed his hand. “Jason, you okay?” She wore faded jeans, hiking boots, and a fleece snowboarding jacket. Her chocolate brown hair was cut choppy and uneven, with thin strands braided down the sides. She wore no makeup like she was trying not to draw attention to herself, but it didn’t work. She was seriously pretty. Her eyes seemed to change color like a kaleidoscope—brown, blue, and green. Jason let go of her hand. “Um, I don’t—” In the front of the bus, a teacher shouted, “All right, cupcakes, listen up!” The guy was obviously a coach. His baseball cap was pulled low over his hair, so you could just see his beady eyes. He had a wispy goatee and a sour face, like he’d eaten something moldy. His buff arms and chest pushed against a bright orange polo shirt. His nylon workout pants and Nikes were spotless white. A whistle hung from his neck, and a megaphone was clipped to his belt. He would’ve looked pretty scary if he hadn’t been five feet zero. When he stood up in the aisle, one of the students called, “Stand up, Coach Hedge!” “I heard that!” The coach scanned the bus for the offender. Then his eyes fixed on Jason, and his scowl deepened. A jolt went down Jason’s spine. He was sure the coach knew he didn’t belong there. He was going to call Jason out, demand to know what he was doing on the bus—and Jason wouldn’t have a clue what to say. But Coach Hedge looked away and cleared his throat. “We’ll arrive in five minutes! Stay with your partner. Don’t lose your worksheet. And if any of you precious little cupcakes causes any trouble on this trip, I will personally send you back to campus the hard way.

The top surface of the computer is smooth except for a fisheye lens, a polished glass dome with a purplish optical coating. Whenever Hiro is using the machine, this lens emerges and clicks into place, its base flush with the surface of the computer. The neighborhood loglo is curved and foreshortened on its surface. Hiro finds it erotic. This is partly because he hasn't been properly laid in several weeks. But there's more to it. Hiro's father, who was stationed in Japan for many years, was obsessed with cameras. He kept bringing them back from his stints in the Far East, encased in many protective layers, so that when he took them out to show Hiro, it was like watching an exquisite striptease as they emerged from all that black leather and nylon, zippers and straps. And once the lens was finally exposed, pure geometric equation made real, so powerful and vulnerable at once, Hiro could only think it was like nuzzling through skirts and lingerie and outer labia and inner labia. . . . It made him feel naked and weak and brave. The lens can see half of the universe -- the half that is above the computer, which includes most of Hiro. In this way, it can generally keep track of where Hiro is and what direction he's looking in. Down inside the computer are three lasers -- a red one, a green one, and a blue one. They are powerful enough to make a bright light but not powerful enough to burn through the back of your eyeball and broil your brain, fry your frontals, lase your lobes. As everyone learned in elementary school, these three colors of light can be combined, with different intensities, to produce any color that Hiro's eye is capable of seeing. In this way, a narrow beam of any color can be shot out of the innards of the computer, up through that fisheye lens, in any direction. Through the use of electronic mirrors inside the computer, this beam is made to sweep back and forth across the lenses of Hiro's goggles, in much the same way as the electron beam in a television paints the inner surface of the eponymous Tube. The resulting image hangs in space in front of Hiro's view of Reality. By drawing a slightly different image in front of each eye, the image can be made three-dimensional. By changing the image seventy-two times a second, it can be made to move. By drawing the moving three-dimensional image at a resolution of 2K pixels on a side, it can be as sharp as the eye can perceive, and by pumping stereo digital sound through the little earphones, the moving 3-D pictures can have a perfectly realistic soundtrack. So Hiro's not actually here at all. He's in a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It.

The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor. But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary ... You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals. You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs. My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference? That is the magic that exchange and specialisation have wrought for the human species.

As he sat up, he heard soft dripping sounds from the bathroom, little plips like water slipping over the edges of the tub and into the floor. The hairs on the back of his neck rose as he realized where he‟d last heard that sound. His muscles tight with strain from his earlier exertions, he stood and walked warily toward the half open bathroom door and the tub beyond it. Slipping quietly past the door, he saw that the curtain was drawn, and again the shadowed figure lay behind it. One long, slim, leg dangled from the end of the tub, beads of water gliding down its length and off the polished toes. At the other end he saw a mass of auburn curls, matted deep red near the porcelain of the tub. It was the dream and the vision again, more real now, too strong to deny. Shaking, he moved toward the curtain, gagging on the sickly smell of rust and roses, feeling the thin nylon glide between thumb and palm as he pulled it back to reveal his darkest nightmare and deepest regret. He could see the crimson water now, blood bubbles gliding over its surface and clinging to the legs dangling over the tub‟s edge. When he‟d pulled the curtain completely away from the tub and around to its opposite side, he saw her face. Her eyes were closed and he saw that her lids were bruised and purple against the translucent paleness of her face, drained completely dead white under the makeup she‟d brushed on before she‟d died. Staggering by the sight of her, he knelt by the tub and extended one shaking hand to touch her cheek. It all seemed as if he‟d walked into a horror film and once again he needed to prove to his mind that this wasn‟t real. His hand shook as he lifted it nearer to her flesh, waiting for the corpse, the supposedly dead and buried to move. He touched his quivering fingers to her face, feeling its claylike reality. The sensation caused an immediate shudder of revulsion and he fought not to vomit. Even as the moment came, the sight of her moving in the water startled him and he jumped away from the tub. It wasn‟t an obvious movement at first, only soft breaths moving in and out of her nostrils, but then her chest rose and fell with it and he quaked, feeling unstable where he knelt on the floor. Her eyes opened next and he felt the blood fall out of his face, wanting to scream but too afraid he would cause her to take some action, to reach out and touch him, proving well and forever that he was indeed insane. Scream and you might as well slit your own throat. He swallowed the scream like a rock and stared as her eyes moved slowly in their sockets, locking on him. Slowly, as if she‟d lost control of her muscles, she rose from the tub and looked down at him, smiling. Blood water slid down her bare body, over her neck, down her back and the smooth ridges of her breasts, to slip slowly down her thighs and down over her calves. A puddle spread on the floor, and as it extended toward him he struggled to his feet, skittering away from it. As he watched it spread, he shivered, weak as he started to cry frantic, horrified tears. Breaking down, he looked back up at her face and slipped to the floor once more, his knees incapable of sustaining his own weight. The smile grew wider as she strode to his shivering form, thrown on his side and struggling to rise. The blood water seeped into his clothes, making him sick, a drop of it trickling along the lobe of his ear and into it. And then she leaned down, holding those dim, stained curls of auburn out of her face and tucking them behind her ear. Her lips parted, blue beneath the strong crimson red of her lipstick, and she spoke into his ear with the chill breath of the dead. His eyes grew wide and horrified as she spoke, the hair on his neck rising, sending a maddening shiver of fear through him. “I‟ve returned, Raven.” She whispered “And I want what is mine.” The last thing he saw before his mind, finally, thankfully, shut down was her face in front of his. They were pursed for a kiss.

His hand brushes against my nylons and make me suck in a breath. The feeling of his fingers sliding along the fabric ... purr, purr. Please don't stop doing that.

When I find a pair of pants I like, I buy a lot of them. Really a lot. Perhaps there’s something genetic here; I collect pants like my Uncle Morris collected meat. I do this because pants wear out. Is this part of a plot by the clothing manufacturers to keep us buying more? Some people think so. In my Sound and Fury file, I find an old (September 20, 1982) Ann Landers column about pantyhose manufacturers who deliberately create products that self-destruct after a week instead of a year because “the no-run nylons, which they know how to make, would put a serious crimp in their sales.” Ann concludes that she and her readers are “at the mercy of a conspiracy of self-interest.” One wonders whose self-interest Ann has in mind. Surely it’s not the manufacturers’. If there were a cost-justified way to do it, any self-interested manufacturer would switch from selling one-week nylons at $1 to selling one-year nylons at $52. That pleases the customers (whose pantyhose budget doesn’t change but who make fewer trips to the store), maintains the manufacturer’s revenue, and—because he produces about 98 percent fewer nylons—cuts his costs considerably.

I think so Brain, but what if the chicken won't wear the nylons?

I scrambled for cover. Saw my backpack on the ground. Had a hand on it. Was going to use it to block the attack—because nylon was so robust against steel—

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be lurking under the giant cottonwood that dominated our front yard. She wasn’t wearing any nylons with

The driver got out. He looked like a cop—blond crew cut, red face, white shirt, black-and-gold nylon tie, the heft of his gut dropping over his belt buckle like a stack of pancakes. The other one looked sick. He was skinny and tired-looking and stayed in his seat, one hand gripping his skull through greasy black hair, staring into the side-view mirror as the three boys came around near the driver’s door. The beefy one crooked a finger at them, then wiggled it toward his chest until they stood in front of him.

EVEN BEFORE HE GOT ELECTROCUTED, Jason was having a rotten day. He woke in the backseat of a school bus, not sure where he was, holding hands with a girl he didn’t know. That wasn’t necessarily the rotten part. The girl was cute, but he couldn’t figure out who she was or what he was doing there. He sat up and rubbed his eyes, trying to think. A few dozen kids sprawled in the seats in front of him, listening to iPods, talking, or sleeping. They all looked around his age…fifteen? Sixteen? Okay, that was scary. He didn’t know his own age. The bus rumbled along a bumpy road. Out the windows, desert rolled by under a bright blue sky. Jason was pretty sure he didn’t live in the desert. He tried to think back…the last thing he remembered… The girl squeezed his hand. “Jason, you okay?” She wore faded jeans, hiking boots, and a fleece snowboarding jacket. Her chocolate brown hair was cut choppy and uneven, with thin strands braided down the sides. She wore no makeup like she was trying not to draw attention to herself, but it didn’t work. She was seriously pretty. Her eyes seemed to change color like a kaleidoscope—brown, blue, and green. Jason let go of her hand. “Um, I don’t—” In the front of the bus, a teacher shouted, “All right, cupcakes, listen up!” The guy was obviously a coach. His baseball cap was pulled low over his hair, so you could just see his beady eyes. He had a wispy goatee and a sour face, like he’d eaten something moldy. His buff arms and chest pushed against a bright orange polo shirt. His nylon workout pants and Nikes were spotless white. A whistle hung from his neck, and a megaphone was clipped to his belt. He would’ve looked pretty scary if he hadn’t been five feet zero. When he stood up in the aisle, one of the students called, “Stand up, Coach Hedge!” “I heard that!” The coach scanned the bus for the offender. Then his eyes fixed on Jason, and his scowl deepened. A jolt went down Jason’s spine. He was sure the coach knew he didn’t belong there. He was going to call Jason out, demand to know what he was doing on the bus—and Jason wouldn’t have a clue what to say. But Coach Hedge looked away and cleared his throat. “We’ll arrive in five minutes! Stay with your partner. Don’t lose your worksheet. And if any of you precious little cupcakes causes any trouble on this trip, I will personally send you

I always started with his feet, but my eyes locked onto his hips first. They rested just above low-lying black nylon shorts, and how they stayed on those hips was some kind of Heavenly act. I followed the path laid out before me of abdominal muscles that any artist of the human form would envy that I had such intimate knowledge of. The skin of his golden chest covering perfect pectorals was inches away. The next stop my eyes made, though, made me pause. A wry smirk looked back at me. I was staring. Again.

The worst thing about zombies? The stains. Cadaver juice. It's the mother of all bodily fluids. It takes sodium hypochlorite bleach to get out of nylons. The number of pantyhose I went through in the nineties could fill the Baxter building.

It's not much of a stretch to believe that Jesus, if he attended church today, would probably go to a place where nylons and ties are scarce, where homeless people show up in clothing that hasn't been washed, and where teenagers slide down the stairs in sleeping bags.

Instead of walking along the winding roads she had settled on hiking, which she had discovered was both more difficult and more likely to yield photographic possibilities. She carried her cameras in a nylon backpack. There was a dry wall of stone that she had photographed from a number of angles and that she thought might have possibilities. There was an old paper wasp nest built around the limb of a pine tree that had galvanized her for an entire morning and then when she looked at the pictures afterward on the computer screen they’d amounted to nothing, nothing that made her feel or think or look twice or hard. They were photographs you had to explain, which meant they were a failure. The

A man in a nylon bikini, with that little knot sticking out in front, isn’t half as interesting as a man in a good-looking business suit. Charlie

They’d done a good job with the head, the great drooping lips and meaty cheeks. The soprano sang to the head for close to half an hour. I looked over at Boris. He was tapping on the floor with his foot. His pants had ridden up and the sock on his right foot—a thin black nylon sock—had slid into his shoe. There was about a two-inch space of exposed fleshy ankle. I reached down, carefully, slowly, and pulled up Boris’s sock. Boris looked over at me but didn’t care, and soon—without much explanation—the opera ended.

To say he had doubts about this excursion, which Wyoming State University hadn't even authorized, would easily qualify for the understatement of the year. But as he pondered his reason for doing this, Ellington bit his lip, swallowed a bolus of raw fear in his throat and continued to descend, allowing the nylon rope to slip through the carabiner underneath his posterior.

They mixed baby oil with iodine, slathered it on their legs, and sat out in the sun to give them a reddish-brown tan that approximated the look of nylons.[82]

Check the sewing, buckles, belts, strings and nylon webbing before each use to make sure they are all in excellent condition and will hold your baby securely while being carried.

Their obese emperors from New York are suave smiling assassins who buy silk, nylon, cigars petty tyrants and dictators. They buy countries, people, seas, police, county councils, distant regions where the poor hoard their corn like misers their gold: Standard Oil awakens them, clothes them in uniforms, designates which brother is the enemy. The Paraguayan fights its war, and the Bolivian wastes away in the jungle with its machine gun. A President assassinated for a drop of petroleum, a million-acre mortgage, a swift execution on a morning mortal with light, petrified, a new prison camp for subversives, in Patagonia, a betrayal, scattered shots beneath a petroliferous moon, a subtle change of ministers in the capital, a whisper like an oil tide, and zap, you’ll see how Standard Oil’s letters shine above the clouds, above the seas, in your home, illuminating their dominions.

I dare say being a receptionist at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square gets you a reasonable salary and all the nylon stockings you can eat,

Bailey Blue Polypropylene Rods, Universal and Lockfast, different lengths to unblock drains and sewers including flexible nylon rods, steelflex rods.

Reading Group Guide  1.   The river town of Hobnob, Mississippi, is in danger of flooding. To offset the risk, the townspeople were offered the chance to relocate in exchange for money. Some people jumped at the opportunity (the Flooders); others (the Stickers) refused to leave, so the deal fell through. If you lived in Hobnob, which choice would you make and why? If you’d lived in New Orleans at the time of Hurricane Katrina, would you have fled the storm or stayed to protect your house? Did the two floods remind you of each other in terms of official government response or media coverage?  2.   How are the circumstances during the Prohibition era (laws against consuming or selling alcohol, underground businesses that make and sell booze on the black market, corruption in the government and in law enforcement) similar to what’s happening today (the fight to legalize and tax marijuana, the fallout of the drug war in countries like Mexico and Colombia, jails filled with drug abusers)? How are the circumstances different? Do you identify with the bootleggers or the prohibitionists in the novel? What is your stance on the issue today?  3.   The novel is written in third person from two different perspectives—Ingersoll’s and Dixie Clay’s—in alternating chapters. How do you think this approach adds to or detracts from the story? Are you a fan of books written from multiple perspectives, or do you prefer one character to tell his/her side of the story?  4.   The Tilted World is written by two authors. Do you think it reads differently than a book written by only one? Do you think you could coauthor a novel with a loved one? Did you try to guess which author wrote different passages?  5.   Language and dialect play an important role in the book. Do you think the southern dialect is rendered successfully? How about the authors’ use of similes (“wet towels hanging out of the upstairs windows like tongues”; “Her nylon stockings sagged around her ankles like shedding snakeskin.”). Do they provide necessary context or flavor?  6.   At the end of Chapter 5, when Jesse, Ham, and Ingersoll first meet, Ingersoll realizes that Jesse has been drinking water the entire time they’ve been at dinner. Of course, Ham and Ingersoll are both drunk from all the moonshine. How does this discovery set the stage for what happens in the latter half of the book?  7.   Ingersoll grew up an orphan. In what ways do you think that independence informed his character? His choices throughout the novel? Dixie Clay also became independent, after marrying Jesse and becoming ostracized from friends and family. Later, after Ingersoll rescues her, she reflects, “For so long she’d relied only on herself. She’d needed to. . . . But now she’d let someone in. It should have felt like weakness, but it didn’t.” Are love and independence mutually exclusive? How did the arrival of Willy prepare these characters for the changes they’d have to undergo to be ready for each other?  8.   Dixie Clay becomes a bootlegger not because she loves booze or money but because she needs something to occupy her time. It’s true, however, that she’s not only breaking the law but participating in a system that perpetrates violence. Do you think there were better choices she could have made? Consider the scene at the beginning of the novel, when there’s a showdown between Jesse and two revenuers interested in making an arrest. Dixie Clay intercepts the arrest, pretending to be a posse of gunslingers protecting Jesse and the still. Given what you find out about Jesse—his dishonesty, his drunkenness, his womanizing—do you think she made the right choice? If you were in Dixie Clay’s shoes, what would you have done?  9.   When Ham learns that Ingersoll abandoned his post at the levee to help Dixie Clay, he feels not only that Ingersoll acted

I found the ad in a community booster paper. “Sharp, experienced go-getter wanted to strip/refinish woodwork. Enthusiasm a must.” I had spent years refinishing, first in Raleigh and then again in Chicago. I always vowed I’d never do it again, but that’s the problem with having a skill: once you swear off it, you know you’re stuck with it forever. All work seems designed to kill you, but refinishing is tailor-made to provide a long and painful death. The chemical strippers are sold in metal cans picturing a skull and crossbones, and the list of ingredients reads like a who’s who in the world of cancer-causing agents. These strippers will eat through plastic buckets, rubber gloves, and nylon brushes. One is advised to wear a respirator but I rejected it, as the cumbersome mask tended to interfere with my smoking.

He got a lovely pair of trainers given off his mum for Christmas, best pair he ever had, but it was the nylon laces that he couldn’t take his eyes off. They found him hanging in his cell!

the concourse jarred Rachel out of her brooding. A young woman, a near twin to Rachel, barreled down the aisle at top speed and flung her arms around Rachel’s neck. A yellow nylon tote bag dropped on Rachel’s toes and a wheeled suitcase spun away

an eye-jangling assortment of spurious clan tartans, adorning every conceivable object made of fabric, from caps, neckties, and serviettes down to a particularly horrid yellow “Buchanan” sett used to make men’s nylon Y-front underpants.

Judy Nylon, who as a child had sought succour from her parents’ escapist ‘exotica’ albums and regularly drifted off to sleep to the lulling vibraphones of Martin Denny’s Quiet Village, recalls a slightly different version of events: ‘So it was pouring rain in Leicester Square,

But as her body moves, all the yarn in the room suddenly gains tension. There's a swift swishing sound as the lines pull taut. She feels everything in the room move at once, from the big ropey lines supporting her weight, down to the tiny interlocking stitches pressed against her skin. "She rests in mid-air, suspended above her bed by the network of yarn slicing around the room. It holds her, and at the same time it caresses her. She feels its touch through the stitches on her arms, her legs, her stomach. It feels as if her weight is held in its giant hand, and it contemplates her like Yorick's skull. Hundreds of strings and lines of yarn, ranging from individual strands up to thick knitted cables now move on her. She is wrapped by long meaty loops that move around her legs, and her arms, and her neck; and thin little strings that slip between her fingers. A loop circles her hair and pulls it gently into a pony tail, and it lifts to supports her head. "She hangs quietly and meditatively for a while, feeling the caress of the yarn, gently tightening and loosening, and sliding over her body. It feels along her body. And as it feels her, she feels it. She can feel its affection through the way the yarn touches her. The caresses slide up and down her arms, her legs, between her fingers, and around her neck. "She can feel all the different textures of the different yarns. The scratchy itch of cheap wool, and the smooth toughness of nylon and polyester strings. In places there's even some slick and soft rayon and silk. And she's sure she can tell just by the touch of it, that her foot has been wrapped in a small scarf she made of an extremely fine cashmere. "But the thing doesn't just want to hold her.