Parking Meter Quotes

A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running.

Make your own dream. That's the Beatles' story, isn't it? That's Yoko's story, that's what I'm saying now. Produce your own dream. If you want to save Peru, go save Peru. It's quite possible to do anything, but not to put it on the leaders and the parking meters. Don't expect Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan or John Lennon or Yoko Ono or Bob Dylan or Jesus Christ to come and do it for you. You have to do it yourself. That's what the great masters and mistresses have been saying ever since time began. They can point the way, leave signposts and little instructions in various books that are now called holy and worshipped for the cover of the book and not for what it says, but the instructions are all there for all to see, have always been and always will be. There's nothing new under the sun. All the roads lead to Rome. And people cannot provide it for you. I can't wake you up. You can wake you up. I can't cure you. You can cure you.

The kitchen was bright, cheerful yellow, the walls decorated with framed chalk and pencil sketches Simon and Rebecca had done in grade school. Rebecca had some drawing talent, you could tell, but Simon's sketches of people all looked like parking meters with tufts of hair.

Produce your own dream. If you want to save Peru, go save Peru. It’s quite possible to do anything, but not if you put it on the leaders and the parking meters. Don’t expect Carter or Reagan or John Lennon or Yoko Ono or Bob Dylan or Jesus Christ to come and do it for you. You have to do it yourself.

using parking meters as walking sticks.

It was here in Mayfair, that adjectives such as gracious elegant sophisticated and sublime trip off the tongue like coins into a parking meter.

If you have never said "Excuse me" to a parking meter or bashed your shins on a fireplug, you are probably wasting too much valuable reading time.

The thing about her is, she’s good-natured. He knew it the second he saw her standing by the parking meters. He could just tell from the soft way her belly looked. With women, you keep bumping against them, because they want different things, they’re a different race. Either they give, like a plant, or scrape, like a stone. In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman’s good nature.

How To Tell If Somebody Loves You: Somebody loves you if they pick an eyelash off of your face or wet a napkin and apply it to your dirty skin. You didn’t ask for these things, but this person went ahead and did it anyway. They don’t want to see you looking like a fool with eyelashes and crumbs on your face. They notice these things. They really look at you and are the first to notice if something is amiss with your beautiful visage! Somebody loves you if they assume the role of caretaker when you’re sick. Unsure if someone really gives a shit about you? Fake a case of food poisoning and text them being like, “Oh, my God, so sick. Need water.” Depending on their response, you’ll know whether or not they REALLY love you. “That’s terrible. Feel better!” earns you a stay in friendship jail; “Do you need anything? I can come over and bring you get well remedies!” gets you a cozy friendship suite. It’s easy to care about someone when they don’t need you. It’s easy to love them when they’re healthy and don’t ask you for anything beyond change for the parking meter. Being sick is different. Being sick means asking someone to hold your hair back when you vomit. Either love me with vomit in my hair or don’t love me at all. Somebody loves you if they call you out on your bullshit. They’re not passive, they don’t just let you get away with murder. They know you well enough and care about you enough to ask you to chill out, to bust your balls, to tell you to stop. They aren’t passive observers in your life, they are in the trenches. They have an opinion about your decisions and the things you say and do. They want to be a part of it; they want to be a part of you. Somebody loves you if they don’t mind the quiet. They don’t mind running errands with you or cleaning your apartment while blasting some annoying music. There’s no pressure, no need to fill the silences. You know how with some of your friends there needs to be some sort of activity for you to hang out? You don’t feel comfortable just shooting the shit and watching bad reality TV with them. You need something that will keep the both of you busy to ensure there won’t be a void. That’s not love. That’s “Hey, babe! I like you okay. Do you wanna grab lunch? I think we have enough to talk about to fill two hours!" It’s a damn dream when you find someone you can do nothing with. Whether you’re skydiving together or sitting at home and doing different things, it’s always comfortable. That is fucking love. Somebody loves you if they want you to be happy, even if that involves something that doesn’t benefit them. They realize the things you need to do in order to be content and come to terms with the fact that it might not include them. Never underestimate the gift of understanding. When there are so many people who are selfish and equate relationships as something that only must make them happy, having someone around who can take their needs out of any given situation if they need to. Somebody loves you if they can order you food without having to be told what you want. Somebody loves you if they rub your back at any given moment. Somebody loves you if they give you oral sex without expecting anything back. Somebody loves you if they don’t care about your job or how much money you make. It’s a relationship where no one is selling something to the other. No one is the prostitute. Somebody loves you if they’ll watch a movie starring Kate Hudson because you really really want to see it. Somebody loves you if they’re able to create their own separate world with you, away from the internet and your job and family and friends. Just you and them. Somebody will always love you. If you don’t think this is true, then you’re not paying close enough attention.

Getting a rise out of him was like trying to give a handjob to a parking meter: you were going to end up frustrated and exhausted long before a cop came along to haul you away.

The blue mountains are constantly walking." Dōgen is quoting the Chan master Furong. -- "If you doubt mountains walking you do not know your own walking." -- Dōgen is not concerned with "sacred mountains" - or pilgrimages, or spirit allies, or wilderness as some special quality. His mountains and streams are the processes of this earth, all of existence, process, essence, action, absence; they roll being and non-being together. They are what we are, we are what they are. For those who would see directly into essential nature, the idea of the sacred is a delusion and an obstruction: it diverts us from seeing what is before our eyes: plain thusness. Roots, stems, and branches are all equally scratchy. No hierarchy, no equality. No occult and exoteric, no gifted kids and slow achievers. No wild and tame, no bound or free, no natural and artificial. Each totally its own frail self. Even though connected all which ways; even because connected all which ways. This, thusness, is the nature of the nature of nature. The wild in wild. So the blue mountains walk to the kitchen and back to the shop, to the desk, to the stove. We sit on the park bench and let the wind and rain drench us. The blue mountains walk out to put another coin in the parking meter, and go down to the 7-Eleven. The blue mountains march out of the sea, shoulder the sky for a while, and slip back to into the waters.

I wish I was a parking meter, able to buy more time with the drop of a quarter.

I think it’s a federal crime parking meters won’t accept pennies. Yeah, government, we know pennies suck. But you made them! You have to accept them! Parking meters are literally one of the three things anyone uses coins for and you decide you don’t want to deal with them?

A person should be buried only half a meter, or two feet, below the surface. Then a tree should be planted there. He should be buried in a coffin that decays so that when you plant a tree on top the tree will take something out of his substance and change it into tree-substance. When you visit the grave you don’t visit a dead man, you visit a living being who was just transformed into a tree. You say, “This is my grandfather, the tree is growing well, fantastic.” You can develop a beautiful forest that will be more beautiful than a normal forest because the trees will have their roots in graves. It will be a park, a place for pleasure, a place to live, even a place to hunt.

Now that parking meters have shifted from quarters to credit cards, I worry someone will steal my identity, my wallet, and my car and drive around town parking all over the place.

made a face at her. “I’m not gay,” he said. “You of all people should know that.” “You were fifteen. It didn’t matter if I was male, female, or a parking meter.

A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running. Groucho Marx

Our current government doesn’t give a f*** about transportation. They only give a f*** about making money. When it comes to synchronizing the traffic lights and cutting down on that lost time sitting in traffic, they don’t have the IQ for that. But when it comes to stuff that makes them money—chickens*** tickets, parking meters, and speed traps—they’re all Lex Luthor. They turn into diabolical mad geniuses.

My work at Westwind had given me access to emotions I didn't know I was capable of. I would start laughing or crying at the drop of a damn hat. Crying at a particularly beautiful sunset or a particularly beautiful parking meter, it didn't matter. It felt as if my life up to this point was spent living within a tiny range of sensations, rolling back and forth like a pinball. At Westwind that emotional range was blasted apart, allowing for ecstasy and despair like I had never experienced it.

Today, reality is created mainly by television and movies. The media producers have become a priest-caste who guide, direct, and manage reality. "I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more . . . " "Don't follow leaders! Watch your parking meters!" When Bob Dylan sang these lines in the 1960s, he was performing philosophy, transmitting powerful new ideas for which his mass audience was ready. Dylan thus triggered off heretical, sinful acts of resistance to authority, rejection of militarism, refusal to join the mechanical factory culture.

We decided to attend to our community instead of asking our community to attend the church.” His staff started showing up at local community events such as sports contests and town hall meetings. They entered a float in the local Christmas parade. They rented a football field and inaugurated a Free Movie Night on summer Fridays, complete with popcorn machines and a giant screen. They opened a burger joint, which soon became a hangout for local youth; it gives free meals to those who can’t afford to pay. When they found out how difficult it was for immigrants to get a driver’s license, they formed a drivers school and set their fees at half the going rate. My own church in Colorado started a ministry called Hands of the Carpenter, recruiting volunteers to do painting, carpentry, and house repairs for widows and single mothers. Soon they learned of another need and opened Hands Automotive to offer free oil changes, inspections, and car washes to the same constituency. They fund the work by charging normal rates to those who can afford it. I heard from a church in Minneapolis that monitors parking meters. Volunteers patrol the streets, add money to the meters with expired time, and put cards on the windshields that read, “Your meter looked hungry so we fed it. If we can help you in any other way, please give us a call.” In Cincinnati, college students sign up every Christmas to wrap presents at a local mall — ​no charge. “People just could not understand why I would want to wrap their presents,” one wrote me. “I tell them, ‘We just want to show God’s love in a practical way.’ ” In one of the boldest ventures in creative grace, a pastor started a community called Miracle Village in which half the residents are registered sex offenders. Florida’s state laws require sex offenders to live more than a thousand feet from a school, day care center, park, or playground, and some municipalities have lengthened the distance to half a mile and added swimming pools, bus stops, and libraries to the list. As a result, sex offenders, one of the most despised categories of criminals, are pushed out of cities and have few places to live. A pastor named Dick Witherow opened Miracle Village as part of his Matthew 25 Ministries. Staff members closely supervise the residents, many of them on parole, and conduct services in the church at the heart of Miracle Village. The ministry also provides anger-management and Bible study classes.

We couldn't afford to go inside. On other days, we would visit art museums. There was only enough money for one ticket, so one of us would go in, look at the exhibits, and report back to the other. On one such occasion, we went to the relatively new Whitney Museum on the Upper East Side. It was my turn to go in, and I reluctantly entered without him. I no longer remember the exhibit, but I do recall peering through on of the museum's unique trapezoidal windows, seeing Robert across the street, leaning against a parking meter, smoking a cigarette. He waited for me, and as we headed toward the subway he said, "One day we'll go in together, and the work will be ours.

Going out? Are you going out? He's not going out? What do you mean he's not going out? Are you out here because you're still mad that they moved the Dodgers to L.A.? Are you going out or not? You're not going out? I guess you're not going out — huh? You mean go out parking in the evenings? Are you going out to park? Mr. Tepper, he asked at one point, did you ever — if you were in the middle of an interesting story in the paper or perhaps an interesting conversation with somebody who dropped in to talk to you while you were parking — notice that the meter had run out and therefore go out and put more money in the meter? If we're both keeping an eye out, what does it hurt?

Pirate and Osbie Feel are leaning on their roof-ledge, a magnificent sunset across and up the winding river, the imperial serpant, crowds of factories, flats, parks, smoky spires and gables, incandescent sky casting downward across the miles of deep streets and roofs cluttering and sinuous river Thames a drastic strain of burnt orange, to remind a visitor of his mortal transience here, to seal or empty all the doors and windows in sight to his eyes that look only for a bit of company, a word or two in the street before he goes up to the soap-heavy smell of the rented room and the squares of coral sunset on the floor-boards—an antique light, self-absorbed, fuel consumed in the metered winter holocaust, the more distant shapes among the threads or sheets of smoke now perfect ash ruins of themselves, nearer windows, struck a moment by the sun, not reflecting at all but containing the same destroying light, this intense fading in which there is no promise of return, light that rusts the government cars at the curbsides, varnishes the last faces hurrying past the shops in the cold as if a vast siren had finally sounded, light that makes chilled untraveled canals of many streets, and that fills with the starlings of London, converging by millions to hazy stone pedestals, to emptying squares and a great collective sleep. They flow in rings, concentric rings on the radar screens. The operators call them ‘angels.

I know that I've lost something now because this keeps happening, and I feel as if this is all I ever come to, to this place, this knife, this feeling, almost killing, and I wonder that I'm not drunk because I feel fucked up and cold and hot, and this man, the drunk man, he's backing away from me toward a parked car and he trips over the parking meter and stumbles and takes a few steps and there's a wall he can follow along and he's scuttling back into the doorway of the bar and his off-white shirt gets hazy like cottonwood down floating off the river back home but it's hot in the spring there, back home, when the cottonwoods are dropping, and nothing about this night is even warm at all except my fist around the handle of the knife that's still cold, and there's the smell of the river water, the water in the air, and water everywhere, over my eyes and the city and the night, and I wonder why the water's not frozen because it's cold, cold every night here, so fucking cold, and no amount of weed will warm me up because I'm a long way from home and my bed and my room and my house and my family and anything and everything and everyone that I have ever loved, and I can sleep on a dirty floor with gum and spiders and garbage and wrappers and ants and dust and spit and cum, and I can sleep here and wake up, and I can sleep here and wake up again, but no amount of sleeping and waking will ever make it right.

It took nearly an hour to reach the cabin. Fearing SS patrols and possible Gestapo roadblocks, Jacob did not take the usual route. To be even more careful, he didn’t drive straight to the cabin. Rather, he parked and hid the motorbike several kilometers away, then proceeded to hike through the woods in the glow of the moonlight, just like he had done in his dream. After nearly twenty minutes of walking in driving rain that showed no signs of letting up, Jacob thought he smelled smoke. Coming up over a ridge less than five hundred meters from the cabin, he suddenly saw enormous flames leaping into the night sky. Standing around were at least a half-dozen Gestapo men holding submachine guns and laughing among themselves.

Perhaps nothing would have happened were it not the pit of summer, with a month and a half ahead. There is no air-conditioning in the apartment, and this year - the summer of 1969 - it seems something is happening to everyone but them. People are getting wasted at Woodstock and singing 'Pinball Wizard' and watching Midnight Cowboy, which none of the Gold children are allowed to see. They're rioting outside Stonewall, ramming the doors with uprooted parking meters, smashing windows and jukeboxes. They're being murdered in the most gruesome way imaginable, with chemical explosives and guns that can fire five hundred and fifty bullets in succession, their faces transmitted with horrifying immediacy to the television in the Gold's kitchen. 'They're walking on the motherf***ing moon,' said Daniel, who has begun to use this sort of language, but only at a safe remove from their mother. James Earl Ray is sentenced, and so is Sirhan Sirhan, and all the while the Golds play jacks or darts or rescue Zoya from an open pipe behind the oven, which she seems convinced is her rightful home. But something else created the atmosphere required for this pilgrimage: they are siblings, this summer, in a way they will never be again. Next year, Varya will go to the Catskills with her friend Aviva. Daniel will be immersed in the private rituals of the neighborhood boys, leaving Klara and Simon to their own devices. In 1969, though, they are still a unit, yoked as if it isn't possible to be anything but.

Let me start with this: I am an apostate. I have lied. I have cheated. I have done things in my life that I am not proud of, including but not limited to: • falling in love with a married man nineteen years ago • being selfish and self-centered • fighting with virtually everyone I have ever known (via hateful emails, texts, and spoken words) • physically threatening people (from parking ticket meter maids to parents who hit their kids in public) • not showing up at funerals of people I loved (because I don’t deal well with death) • being, on occasion, a horrible daughter, mother, sister, aunt, stepmother, wife (this list goes on and on). The same goes for every single person in my family: • My husband, also a serial cheater, sold drugs when he was young. • My mother was a self-admitted slut in her younger days (we’re talking the 1960s, before she got married). • My dad sold cocaine (and committed various other crimes), and then served time at Rikers Island. Why am I revealing all this? Because after the Church of Scientology gets hold of this book, it may well spend an obscene amount of money running ads, creating websites, and trotting out celebrities to make public statements that their religious beliefs are being attacked—all in an attempt to discredit me by disparaging my reputation and that of anyone close to me. So let me save them some money. There is no shortage of people who would be willing to say “Leah can be an asshole”—my own mother can attest to that. And if I am all these things the church may claim, then isn’t it also accurate to say that in the end, thirty-plus years of dedication, millions of dollars spent, and countless hours of study and

Why?” “Why? Blimey, Harry, everyone’d be wantin’ magic solutions to their problems. Nah, we’re best left alone.” At this moment the boat bumped gently into the harbor wall. Hagrid folded up his newspaper, and they clambered up the stone steps onto the street. Passersby stared a lot at Hagrid as they walked through the little town to the station. Harry couldn’t blame them. Not only was Hagrid twice as tall as anyone else, he kept pointing at perfectly ordinary things like parking meters and saying loudly, “See that, Harry? Things these Muggles dream up, eh?” “Hagrid,” said Harry, panting a bit as he ran to keep up, “did you say there are dragons at Gringotts?” “Well, so they say,” said Hagrid. “Crikey, I’d like a dragon.” “You’d like one?” “Wanted one ever since I was a kid — here we go.” They had reached the station. There was a train to London in five minutes’ time. Hagrid, who didn’t understand “Muggle money,” as he called it, gave the bills to Harry so he could buy their tickets. People stared more than ever on the train. Hagrid took up two seats and sat knitting what looked like a canary-yellow circus tent. “Still got yer letter, Harry?” he asked as he counted stitches. Harry took the parchment envelope out of his pocket. “Good,” said Hagrid. “There’s a list there of everything yeh need.” Harry unfolded a second piece of paper he hadn’t noticed the night before, and read: HOGWARTS SCHOOL of WITCHCRAFT and WIZARDRY UNIFORM First-year students will require: 1. Three sets of plain work robes (black) 2. One plain pointed hat (black) for day wear 3. One pair of protective gloves (dragon hide or similar) 4. One winter cloak (black, silver fastenings) Please note that all pupils’ clothes should carry name tags COURSE BOOKS All students should have a copy of each of the following: The Standard Book of Spells (Grade 1) by Miranda Goshawk A History of Magic by Bathilda Bagshot Magical Theory by Adalbert Waffling A

The PEOPLE, SCHOOL, EVERYONE, and EVERYTHING is so FAKE AND GAY.' 'I shrieked, at the top of my voice fingers outspread and frozen in fear, unlike ever before in my young life; being the gentle, sweet, and shy girl that I am.' 'Besides always too timid to have a voice, to stand up for me, and forced not to, by masters.' Amidst my thoughts racing ridiculously, 'I feel that it is all just another way for the 'SOCIETY' to make me feel inferior, they think, they are so 'SUPERIOR' to me, and who I am to them.' 'Nonetheless, every day of my life, I have felt like I have been drowning in a pool, with weights attached to my ankles.' 'Like, of course, there is no way for me to escape the chains that are holding me down.' 'The one and only person, that holds the key to my freedom: WILL NEVER LET ME GO! It's like there is within me, and has been deep inside me!' 'I now live in this small dull town for too damn long. It is an UNSYMPATHETIC, obscure, lonely, totally depressed, and depressing place, for any teenage girl to be, most definitely if you're a girl like me.' 'All these streets surrounding me are covered with filth, and born in the hills of middle western Pennsylvania mentalities of slow-talking and deep heritages, and beliefs, that don't operate me as a soul lost and lingering within the streets and halls.' 'My old town was ultimately left behind when the municipality neighboring made the alterations to the main roads; just to save five minutes of commuting, through this countryside village. Now my town sits on one side of that highway.' 'Just like a dead carcass to the rest of the world, which rushes by. What is sullen about this is that it is a historic town, with some immeasurable old monuments, and landmarks.' 'However, the others I see downright neglect what is here, just like me, it seems. Other than me, no one cares. Yet I care about all the little things.' 'I am so attached to all these trivial things as if they are a part of me. It disheartens me to see anything go away from me.' 'It's a community where the litter blows and bisects the road, like the tumble-wheats of the yore of times past.' 'Furthermore, if you do not look where you are going, you will fall in our trip, in one of the many potholes or heaved up bumps in the pavement, or have an evacuated structure masonry descending on your head.' 'Merely one foolproof way of simplifying the appearance of this ghost town.' 'There are still some reminders of the glory days when you glance around.' 'Like the town clock, that is evaporated black that has chipped enamel; it seems that it is always missing a few light bulbs.' 'The timepiece only has time pointing hands on the one side, and it nevermore shows the right time of day.' 'The same can be assumed for the neon signs on the mom-and-pop shops, which flicker at night as if they're in agonizing PAIN.' 'Why? To me is a question that is asked frequently.' 'It is all over negligence!' 'I get the sense and feeling most of the time, as they must prepare when looking around here at night.' 'The streetlamps do not all work, as they should. The glass in them is cracked.' 'The parking meters are always jammed, or just completely broken off their posts altogether.' 'The same can be said, for the town sign that titles this area. It is not even here anymore, as it should be now moved to the town square or shortage of a park.

If you have never said, “Excuse me” to a parking meter or bashed your shins on a fireplug, you are probably wasting too much valuable reading time. —Sherri Chasin Calvo

It’s impossible to park on Tremont or even idle there for more than 30 seconds. A platoon of meter maids, imported from the female Hitler Youth shortly after the fall of Berlin, roam the street, at least two to a block, pit bull faces on top of fire hydrant bodies, just waiting for someone stupid enough to stall traffic on their street.

It’s impossible to park on Tremont or even idle there for more than thirty seconds. A platoon of meter maids, imported from the female Hitler Youth shortly after the fall of Berlin, roam the street, at least two to a block, pit bull faces on top of fire hydrant bodies, just waiting for someone stupid enough to stall traffic on their street.

Pike did not move his eye from the sight picture. Cole, Ramos, Park. The Zeiss was fitted with a laser range finder displaying the range in tiny red numerals in the upper right quadrant of the sight picture. Elvis Cole was forty-two meters away. Overkill. Stone

Ga daar de hoek om,' commandeerde Morgan Drummond. 'Snij af door het park. En waag het niet om die verrekte meter nog verder op te laten lopen.' ... Kady greep naar haar heuptasje. 'Oom Edward, u mag wel even met mijn mobieltje bellen dat we te laat komen.' 'Maar we komen niet te laten,' zei Morgan en wendde zich tot de chauffeur. 'Of wel soms?

Our propensity to overvalue what we own is a basic human bias, and it reflects a more general tendency to fall in love with, and be overly optimistic about, anything that has to do with ourselves. Think about it - don't you feel that you are a better-than-average driver, are more likely to be able to afford retirement, and are less likely to suffer from high cholesterol, get a divorce, or get a parking ticket if you overstay your meter by a few minutes? This positivity bias, as psychologists call it, has another name: "The Lake Wobegone Effect", named after the fictional town in Garrison Keillor's popular radio series 'A Prairie Home Companion', In Lake Wobegone, according to Keillor, "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." I don't think we can become more accurate and objective in the way we think about our children and houses, but maybe we can realize that we have such biases and listen more carefully to the advice and feedback we get from the others.

Not long after eight o' clock, the gang's luxury limousine was parked in rue Ordener. "We were fearflully armed", recalled Ganier, "I had no less than six revolvers on me, of which one was butt-mounted witha range of eight hundred meters; my companions each had three, and we had about four hundred rounds in our pockets; we were quite determined to defend ourselves to the death".

You can’t park that here!” he barked. “It’s a red zone!” Courtney lowered her window and glared at him. “I’m not parked. I’m idling! That’s allowable.” “Not on my watch,” the meter man huffed. “According to District Code 46a, subsection D, there is to be no blocking of the red zone for any amount of time for any purpose at all. . . .” “How about national security?” David Stern asked, rolling down his window. “You see, I’m the president of the United States.” “And I’m the queen of Sweden,” the meter man declared sarcastically.

Early that afternoon they came to a small town called Bradbury, which under its Nicosia-class tent looked like something out of Illinois: treelined blacktop streets, screened-in porches fronting two-story brick houses with shingle roofs, a main street with shops and parking meters, a central park with a white gazebo under giant maples.…

Anyone who knows me even slightly will recognize how unusual that is, since I am notorious for making impassioned speeches about things nobody cares about. Like, I think it’s a federal crime parking meters won’t accept pennies. Yeah, government, we know pennies suck. But you made them! You have to accept them! Parking meters are literally one of the three things anyone uses coins for and you decide you don’t want to deal with them? OK, I took a couple hours off to cool off and now I’m back.

I’m prepared to ride around for a while, looking for parking, but then the most magical thing that can happen in L.A. occurs—we find an empty spot just two parking meters down.

Contrary to the impression left by toga party costumes, the toga was closer to the size of a bedroom than a bedsheet, about 20 square meters (24 square yards). Assuming 20 threads to the centimeter (about 130 to the inch), historian Mary Harlow calculates that a toga required about 40 kilometers (25 miles) of wool yarn—enough to reach from Central Park to Greenwich, Connecticut. Spinning that much yarn would take some nine hundred hours, or more than four months of labor, working eight hours a day, six days a week. Ignoring textiles, Harlow cautions, blinds classical scholars to some of the most important economic, political, and organizational challenges that ancient societies faced. Cloth isn’t just for clothes, after all. “Increasingly complex societies required more and more textiles,” she writes. The Roman army, for instance, was a mass consumer of textiles.… Building a fleet required long term planning as woven sails required large amounts of raw material and time to produce. The raw materials needed to be bred, pastured, shorn or grown, harvested, and processed before they reached the spinners. Textile production for both domestic and wider needs demanded time and planning.

…After seventeen minutes of panicky crowds destroying everything in their path, Eric could distinguish, despite all the chaos and hellish noise, the slight buzz of a second plane. He started counting to himself, watching the blazing inferno at the North Tower: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven… The second Boeing glided into the South Tower, WTC-2, and it seemed to Eric that this plane was flying slowly, that its impact was a soft one… Due to the pandemonium all around, the impact itself seemed not to be as loud as the first hit. Still, in a moment the second twin was also blazing. Both skyscrapers were on fire now. Novack looked up again at what had happened a minute before: the terror attack of the century. Then he started walking fast down Church Street, away from the huge buildings that were now on fire. He knew that in about an hour, the South Tower was to collapse completely, and half an hour after that, the same was to happen to the North Tower, which was also weakened by the impact. He knew there were tons of powerful Thermate in both buildings. Over the course of the previous two months, some fake repairmen had brought loads of it into the towers and put them in designated places around the trusswork. It was meant to make buildings collapse like card towers, which would only happen when the flames reached a certain point. The planes had started an unstoppable countdown as soon as they hit the buildings: these were the last minutes of their existence. Next in line was the third building: 7 WTC, which stood north of the Twin Towers. It counted forty-seven floors, and it too was stuffed with Thermate. Novack started getting concerned, however, that the third plane seemed to be late. Where’s the third plane? Why is it late? It’s already fifty minutes after the first impact, and they were supposed to hit the three targets with a time lag of about twenty minutes. Where are you, birdie number three? You are no less important than the first two, and you were also promised to my clients… People were still running in all directions, shouting and bumping into each other. Sirens wailed loudly, heartrendingly; ambulances were rushing around, giving way only to firefighters and emergency rescue teams. Suddenly hundreds of policemen appeared on the streets, but it seemed that they didn’t really know what they were supposed to do. They mostly ran around, yelling into their walkie-talkies. At Thomas Street, Eric walked into a parking lot: the gate arm was up and the security guy must have left, for the door of his booth stood wide open… …Two shots rang out simultaneously during the fifth and the longest second. They were executed synchronously, creating a single, stinging, deadly sound. The bullet from the sixth floor of the book depository went straight up into the sky, as planned. The second bullet shot out of a sniper rifle, held confidently in the arms of a woman behind the hedge, on the grassy knoll. It was her bullet that struck the head of the 35th US president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The woman walked quickly down the grassy knoll. Stepping only about five meters away, she put her rifle into a baby pram waiting there, with a real six-month-old baby boy whimpering inside it. She put on thick glasses and started walking away, exhibiting no haste. Only thirty seconds after the second shot, the woman was gone, nowhere to be seen… After the second or, rather, the third shot, the one from the knoll, President Kennedy’s head was tossed back. Jackie somehow managed to crawl onto the back hood of the car. A security agent from the escort car had already reached them. The motorcade picked up speed and disappeared under the overpass. Zapruder’s camera kept whirring for some seconds. He must have filmed the whole operation – that is, the assassination of an acting US president. But now he simply stood there without saying a word, completely dumbfounded...

There’s a homeless guy hanging around outside. He’s wearing two or three ragged coats and a sweat-stained Captain America baseball cap. Any other day, I might feel sorry for him, but today I eye him like he’s a napping T. rex. He mistakes my look for sympathy and heads my way. Or maybe he’s a Shoggot lookout and I’m going to get to shoot someone after all. He holds out a grimy, callused hand in my direction and we lock eyes. I should be able to read him this close and know whether the homeless look is a gaff or not. But I can’t get a lock on him. His mind is going in a dozen directions at once, which tracks for some of the wilder Shoggots. I keep my eyes on his, giving him my best Lee Van Cleef narrow-eyed stare. Soon, his eyes twitch away. He pulls back his hand and limps behind a parking meter, like he thinks I won’t be able to see him there.

managed a hamburger and malt at a Spring Street cafe, then found a spot between Third and Fourth on Broadway to park my sick-yellow Cadillac. I squeezed into the slot, stuck a nickel in the parking meter, and walked ten steps to the Hamilton Building wherein resides Sheldon Scott, Investigations, one flight up.

I glance to my left, but Poppy’s not paying attention. She’s in full social butterfly mode, laughing and chatting it up with the season ticket holders seated behind us. I swear, this woman could make friends with a parking meter.

We couldn't afford to go inside. On other days, we would visit art museums. There was only enough money for one ticket, so one of us would go in, look at the exhibits, and report back to the other. On one such occasion, we went to the relatively new Whitney Museum on the Upper East Side. It was my turn to go in, and I reluctantly entered without him. I no longer remember the exhibit, but I do recall peering through on of the museum's unique trapezoidal windows, seeing Robert across the street, leaning against a parking meter, smoking a cigarette. He waited for me, and as we headed toward the subway he said, "One day we'll go in together, and the work will be ours.

but none seemed remotely interested in the black SUV. The only person paying any attention to it was a meter man from the Department of Parking Enforcement, who stormed toward it with the zeal of a Navy SEAL team, already writing a ticket. “You can’t park that here!” he barked. “It’s a red zone!” Courtney lowered her window and glared at him. “I’m not parked. I’m idling! That’s allowable.” “Not on my watch,” the meter man huffed. “According to District Code 46a, subsection D, there is to be no blocking of the red zone for any amount of time for any purpose at all. . . .” “How about national security?” David Stern asked, rolling down his window. “You see, I’m the president of the United States.” “And I’m the queen of Sweden,” the meter man declared sarcastically. Unaware that he was facing the actual president, he dramatically ripped off the ticket and handed it to Courtney.

Rebecca had some drawing talent, you could tell, but Simon’s sketches of people all looked like parking meters with tufts of hair.

All we know is that we go; and while we have some rules of—etiquette, would it be called?—which bear on the subject, that actual moment has a way of catching folks unprepared. People pass away while making love, while standing in elevators, while putting dimes in parking meters. Some go in midsneeze. Some die in restaurants, some in cheap one-night hotels, and a few while sitting on the john. We cannot count on dying in bed or with our boots on. So it would be remarkable indeed if we did not fear death a little.

They will be moisture sensors, valve controls, “smart dust,” parking meters, home appliances, and so on. These types of end devices almost never contain the processors, memory, hard drives, and other features needed to run a protocol stack.

Jazz had an intuition about such things, the guy could read your eyes like few else could. He was famous for his sarcasm, wit, and dramatics, as well as for holding tightly to a world record for coitus interruptus. He’d been found on floors and rooftops, in taco stands, ladies’ shoes and underwear departments, the DMV—he’d been found by UPS drivers, cops in the park, beach patrol, meter readers, meter maids, meter maids’ boyfriends while on rooftops with the meter maids, National Guardsmen out on maneuvers.

If in poetry court she was called to testify on matters where I was condemned to imprisonment: parking my ego at a broken meter, line violations, forced rhyme, dealing stanzaics to children, shooting off my mouth, getting cute, for even this latest attempt at verse, she would tell the whole truth, she would admit from the pit of her unsung brilliance, from all of the paintings and poems she herself has been making and storing in the vast empire of her singing soul, your Honor, my daughter is guilty of plagiarizing my cells.

Officer!” Samuel Briggs pivoted neatly on his heel, seeking the owner of the voice shouting at him. A dozen people littered the sidewalk, coming and going, most paying him no more attention than they might a parking meter or newsstand. He was a beat cop, after all, a fixture they expected

The drive downtown was uneventful and she pulled in to the parking garage under the building. It was dark and gloomy. She wondered briefly if she should go ahead and park at the meters on the street. Deciding that would be the smart thing to do—see, Baldwin, I’m not a total idiot—she wound her way back up the ramps and onto West End. She found a spot on a meter that had a sign saying she could park there starting at 8:00 a.m. She looked at her watch. Seven forty-five. Close enough. What would they do, give her a ticket?

We get in the car, and someone signals their blinker for my parking spot but I emphatically wave them away like they're after my soul and not just my parking spot. And so we sit there for twelve minutes until the meter runs out. Lily silently crawls from the passenger seat into my lap and curls up into a little ball. She lets out an enormous sigh.

Happy New Year, Cuban Style In Havana, Christmas of 1958 had not been celebrated with the usual festivity. The week between Christmas and New Year’s was filled with uncertainty and the usual joyous season was suspended by many. Visitations among family and friends were few; as people held their breath waiting to see what would happen. It was obvious that the rebel forces were moving ever closer to Havana and on December 31, 1958, when Santa Clara came under the control of “Che” Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos, the people knew that Havana would be next. What they didn’t know was that their President was preparing to leave, taking with him a large part of the national treasury. Aside from the tourists celebrating at the casinos and some private parties held by the naïve elite, very few celebrated New Year’s Eve. A select few left Cuba with Batista, but the majority didn’t find out that they were without a President until the morning of the following day…. January 1, 1959, became a day of hasty departure for many of Batista’s supporters that had been left behind. Those with boats or airplanes left the island nation for Florida or the Dominican Republic, and the rest sought refuge in foreign embassies. The high=flying era of Batista and his chosen few came to a sudden end. Gone were the police that had made such an overwhelming presence while Batista was in power, and in their place were young people wearing black and red “26th of July” armbands. Not wanting a repeat of when Machado fled Cuba, they went around securing government buildings and the homes of the wealthy. Many of these same buildings had been looted and burned after the revolt of 1933. It was expected that Fidel Castro’s rise to power would be organized and orderly. Although the casinos were raided and gambling tables overturned and sometimes burned in the streets, there was no widespread looting with the exception of the hated parking meters that became symbolic of the corruption in Batista’s government. Castro called for a general “walk-out” and when the country ground to a halt, it gave them a movement time to establish a new government. The entire transition took about a week, while his tanks and army trucks rolled into Havana. The revolutionaries sought out Batista’s henchmen and government ministers and arrested them until their status could be established. A few of Batista’s loyalists attempted to shoot it out and were killed for their efforts. Others were tried and executed, but many were simply jailed, awaiting trial at a later time.

Earlier, Susanne’s husband had detected a certain ticking in her, a bomb. He’d packed their children into the car and set out for a night of pizza and a double feature at the second-run movie theatre, leaving her alone to explode, splattering the house with a combination of things she’d ingested as a teen-ager, certain films and punk-rock records that confirmed what she’d guessed: one dies alone. Best to have her family out of the way. Best to have them hidden in a dark cinema when the desire to chop her hair roughly and live on cigarettes surged. These bursts of freedom, while infrequent, were dangerous. Their self-indulgence could tear holes in evenings, marriages, families. She’d been lost in the roar of the vacuum—a device that had the power to put her under a spell, into a trancelike state from which she could most easily contemplate the nature of the universe, the purpose of love, the purpose of death, and a fantasy she sometimes had of being bound nude to a parking meter in the city.

You can’t park that here!” he barked. “It’s a red zone!” Courtney lowered her window and glared at him. “I’m not parked. I’m idling! That’s allowable.” “Not on my watch,” the meter man huffed. “According to District Code 46a, subsection D, there is to be no blocking of the red zone for any amount of time for any purpose at all. . . .” “How about national security?” David Stern asked, rolling down his window. “You see, I’m the president of the United States.” “And I’m the queen of Sweden,” the meter man declared sarcastically. Unaware that he was facing the actual president, he dramatically ripped off the ticket and handed it to Courtney.

Loomis was largely responsible for the committee's wholehearted sponsoring of microwave radar research. The army was skeptical, believing that microwave radar was 'for the next war, not this one." The army had already worked to improve its transmitting tubes so that the wavelength could be reduced to 1 1/2 meters and thought anything much shorter than that could not be perfected anytime soon. Given how slow they had been to capitalize on new technology in the past, Loomis regarded the army's attitude as more a reflection on their own bureaucracy than those posed by the research challenge.

I think it’s a federal crime parking meters won’t accept pennies. Yeah, government, we know pennies suck. But you made them! You have to accept them!

The most important modification that must be made to a standard analysis of incentives is salience. Do the choosers actually notice the incentives they face? In free markets, the answer is usually yes, but in important cases the answer is no. Consider the example of members of an urban family deciding whether to buy a car. Suppose their choices are to take taxis and public transportation or to spend ten thousand dollars to buy a used car, which they can park on the street in front of their home. The only salient costs of owning this car will be the weekly stops at the gas station, occasional repair bills, and a yearly insurance bill. The opportunity cost of the ten thousand dollars is likely to be neglected. (In other words, once they purchase the car, they tend to forget about the ten thousand dollars and stop treating it as money that could have been spent on something else.) In contrast, every time the family uses a taxi the cost will be in their face, with the meter clicking every few blocks. So a behavioral analysis of the incentives of car ownership will predict that people will underweight the opportunity costs of car ownership, and possibly other less salient aspects such as depreciation, and may overweight the very salient costs of using a taxi.* An analysis of choice architecture systems must make similar adjustments.

Our new routine didn't require a stage or a microphone. Comedy isn't just words, syllables, phonemes. It's not just parking meters and airplane food and bad weather and tired punchlines. It's seeing what no one else sees and saying what no one else wants to say.

For generations Ashton had taken pride in its grass-roots warmth and dignity and had striven to be a good place for its children to grow up. But now there were inner turmoils, anxieties, fears, as if some kind of cancer was eating away at the town and invisibly destroying it. On the exterior, there were the store windows now replaced with unsightly plywood, the many parking meters broken off, the litter and broken glass up and down the street. But even as the store owners and businessmen swept up the debris, there seemed to be an unspoken sureness that the inner problems would remain, the troubles would continue. Crime was up, especially among the youth; simple, common trust in one’s neighbor was diminishing; never had the town been so full of rumors, scandals, and malicious gossip. In the shadow of fear and suspicion, life here was gradually losing its joy and simplicity, and no one seemed to know why or how.

The glare of the green landscape and the air, the air that was everywhere, in us and making way for us, and we rode and were aware only of each other and ourselves for those couple of miles, and for those couple of miles I was myself, back in the neighborhood of Chacarita, where I moved with my mom after we realized my dad was never going to move out first, that we would have to leave him, and I saw on either side of me the big ugly high-rises and squat goldenrod houses and fuchsia and blue and inscrutable notes scrawled on the walls, graffiti intermingling with the shimmering, shadowing little leaves of the tipas, and as I rode I slowed at the oleander at Facultad de Medicina, those delicate pink flowers that rose over the fence in utter opulence and the lush stiff leaves that reached out through the bars that were freshly painted bright green. Then there it was: the Great Mamamushi. I slowed, and Freddie slowed. We parked our bikes. I was out of breath and all the air on Earth was in my blood, and we kissed again, and I turned around, and he put his arms around my waist, and I leaned into him, and we beheld it: a tree that was almost too much to be true, that truly was incredible, with its trunk that was almost eight meters around, a staggering circumference, glittered over by dragonflies, heavy, petite, iridescent incarnations of Irena's genius, when suddenly a flock of impossible parrots exploded out of the alders, and we looked up to see them shattering the sky. "All the oaks on this trail have their own names," I explained to Freddie. "This one is my favorite. Can you believe it's still growing?" He put his face against mine. He didn't say anything. For a while we just stood like that, together, watching the Great Mamamushi grow.