Pots Of Money Quotes

The drug war is a total scam, prescription drugs kill 300K a year, while marijuana kills no one, but they spend billions/year 'fighting' it, because pot heads make for good little slaves to put into private prisons, owned by the banks who launder the drug money, and it's ALL DOCUMENTED.

He could take one look at me- at the ashtray, the bottle, the four pots of coffee, my face, and my gut set like a stone on the white band of the towel- he could take one look at me and be pretty sure i ran on heavy fuel.

Marianne replaces the yogurt pot in the freezer now and asks Joanna if she finds it strange, to be paid for her hours at work - to exchange, in other words, blocks of her extremely limited time on this earth for the human invention known as money.

After all, what is money apart from what it can buy?

The Western States nervous under the beginning change. Texas and Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas, New Mexico, Arizona, California. A single family moved from the land. Pa borrowed money from the bank, and now the bank wants the land. The land company--that's the bank when it has land --wants tractors, not families on the land. Is a tractor bad? Is the power that turns the long furrows wrong? If this tractor were ours it would be good--not mine, but ours. If our tractor turned the long furrows of our land, it would be good. Not my land, but ours. We could love that tractor then as we have loved this land when it was ours. But the tractor does two things--it turns the land and turns us off the land. There is little difference between this tractor and a tank. The people are driven, intimidated, hurt by both. We must think about this. One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land, a single tractor took my land. I am alone and bewildered. And in the night one family camps in a ditch and another family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlarge of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here "I lost my land" is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate--"We lost our land." The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first "we" there grows a still more dangerous thing: "I have a little food" plus "I have none." If from this problem the sum is "We have a little food," the thing is on its way, the movement has direction. Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours. The two men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the side- meat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women; behind, the children listening with their souls to words their minds do not understand. The night draws down. The baby has a cold. Here, take this blanket. It's wool. It was my mother's blanket--take it for the baby. This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning--from "I" to "we." If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we." The Western States are nervous under the begining change. Need is the stimulus to concept, concept to action. A half-million people moving over the country; a million more restive, ready to move; ten million more feeling the first nervousness. And tractors turning the multiple furrows in the vacant land.

I can win anytime. Kevin's going to go back to Burbank and tell everybody in his cubicle how he won at the Golden Nugget. Sometimes the pot isn't the money.

No road offers more mystery than that first one you mount from the town you were born to, the first time you mount it of your own volition, on a trip funded by your own coffee tin of wrinkled up dollars - bills you've saved and scrounged for, worked the all-night switchboard for, missed the Rolling Stones for, sold fragrant pot with smashed flowers going brown inside twist-tie plastic baggies for. In fact, to disembark from your origins, you've done everything you can think to scrounge money save selling your spanking young pussy.

I think', said Sally, 'it must be marvellous to be a novelist. You're frightfully dreamy and unpractical and unbusinesslike, and people imagine they can fairly swindle you as much as they want - and then you sit down and write a book about them which fairly shows them what swine they all are, and it's the most terrific success and you make pots of money.

All they do is warm their seats for their long tenures and eventually even their seats get dilapidated with the amount of money they hog in illegally and the only way it comes out is by tilting their huge pot-bellied frames to one side and emitting poisonous gases that not only depreciate their beloved seats but also the nation as a whole and then they shout ‘Global Warming.’ Hallelujah!

I hope my message has at least jarred you into rethinking the standard and conventional approaches to living one’s life—get a good job, work hard through endless hours, and then retire in your sixties or seventies and live out your days in your so-called golden years. But I still ask you: Why wait until your health and life energy have begun to wane? Rather than just focusing on saving up for a big pot full of money that you will most likely not be able to spend in your lifetime, live your life to the fullest now: Chase memorable life experiences, give money to your kids when they can best use it, donate money to charity while you’re still alive. That’s the way to live life. Remember: In the end, the business of life is the acquisition of memories. So what are you waiting for?

Everyone always knows what they're doing," he says abruptly, still not looking up from his hands, the little plastic pot and the old tattoo and the new white dressing on his left wrist. "You know what you're doing, you got your work and your friends and everything and miserable headfucky little teenage girly boys think you're amazing and, I don't know, you might've saved my life, who knows? I might be dead if it weren't for you and Olly but people can't keep looking after me all the time cos that ain't healthy neither, that's just as bad as people not giving a fuck at all. And, like... I'm trying to sort my head out and be a proper grown-up and get my degree and go to work and look after them kids and make sure my dad ain't kicking my sister round the house like a football but it's just so hard all the time, and I know I ain't got no right to complain cos that's just life, ain't it? Everyone's the same, least I ain't got money worries or nothing. I just don't know what I'm doing, everything's too hard. I can try and try forever but I can't be good enough for no one so what the fuck's the point?

The king drinks wine, and the general eats fat duck all day. And yet, they want me to take money from the woman who pours her being into a simple pot?

As soon as we freed ourselves from the mirage of hurrying time—which was nothing more than the projection of our own impatience—we were alive again, as in childhood, to the miracles and ecstasies of ordinary life. You would be astounded at the beauty of our homes, our furniture, our clothes, and even our pots and pans, for we have the time to make most of these things ourselves, and the sense of reality to see that they—rather than money—constitute genuine wealth.

The day after he married her, he delivered a scolding to his wife: ‘No sooner do you arrive here than you start wasting our money.’ But the scolding was less from him than from his aunt, who had ordered him to deliver it. His wife apologized to him, of course, and to the aunt as well – with the potted jonquils she had bought for him in the room.

Life is all about love. Everything — hate, lust, money, power, death, birth — it all stems from love. If life were put in a giant pot and boiled like a piece of chicken, all the fat would melt away, and what you’d be left with is love.

Jo, they have a baby grand piano, but no one in the family plays. They have shelves of books they've never read, and the tension between the couples was so thick it nearly choked us." "Let me tell you something 'bout those rich Uptown folk," said Cokie. "They got everything that money can buy, their bank accounts are fat, but they ain't happy. They ain't ever gone be happy. You know why? They soul broke. And money can't fix that, no sir. My friend Bix was poor. Lord, he had to blow that trumpet ten hours a day just to put a little taste in the pot. Died poor, too. You saw him, Jo, with that plate on his chest. But that man wasn't soul broke.

McLarney laughs, then leaps into the parable of Snot Boogie, who joined the neighborhood crap game, waited for the pot to thicken, then grabbed the cash and bolted down the street only to be shot dead by one of the irate players. "So we're interviewing the witnesses down at the office and they're saying how Snot Boogie would always join the crap game, then run away with the pot, and that they'd finally gotten sick of it..." Dave Brown drives in silence, barely tracking this historical digression. "And I asked one of them, you know, I asked him why they even let Snot Boogie into the game if he always tried to run away with the money." McLarney pauses for effect. "And?" asks Brown. "He just looked at me real bizarre," says McLarney. "And then he says, 'you gotta let him play....This is America

As soon as I had believed that financial security purchased emotional security, I'd lived a dependent, conditional life. Now I realize that rather than mortgage myself for a dream life on a layaway plan, I prefer the rather nice kind of life I've stumbled into. My desire for a double oven has less to do with signaling that I belong to a certain class or have reached a type of perfection and more to do with the fact that I haven't figured out how to make a pot roast and an apple pie at the same time. So I make the pie ahead of time and reheat it. I think it was Mark Twain who said, 'Happiness is wanting what you have, not having what you want.' I tell my kids this, hoping they will learn to balance the act of pursuing with the act of savoring.

The world has far too much morality, at least in the sense of activity of people's moral instincts. If you look, and this become clear to me as I tried to identify the causes of violence at various scales throughout human history, from police blotters where the biggest motive for homicide is not just amoral predacious: a smuggler killing someone to steal his Rolex, the biggest categories of motives for homicide are moralistic in the eyes of the perpetrator, of the murderer, is capital punishment: killing someone who deserve to die because: whether is a spouse who's unfaithful or someone who distim him in an argument over a parking space or cheated him in a deal. That's why people kill each other: for moral reasons. That is true as large scales as well.If you'll look up at the largest episodes of bloodletting in human history most of them would have moralistic motives: the nazi Holocaust, Pol Pot, Stalin, the Gulag, Mao, the European war of religions, the Crusades, all of them were killing people for, not because they wanted to accumulate vast amounts of money, or huge harems of women, but because they thought they were acting out of a moral cause.

I had already imagined how it would be next year. I'd be at Columbia, and Marcus would move to Manhattan, or maybe one of the outer boroughs. I would study hard, and he would make money playing gigs at dingy bars. We'd spend countless hours going to clubs to see bands on the verge, touring obscure art exhibits, and sipping pot after pot of black coffee at hole-in-the-wall cafes. Many more hours would be spent lounging under the covers. We would never run out of witty and fascinating things to say to each other. Eventually, he'd apply to Columbia, and we'd be the sort of well-educated, cosmopolitan couple that confuse the suburbumpkins who never leave Pineville.

The betrayal of Jesus by Judas wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment mistake. He betrayed Jesus each and every time he pilfered the money pot. And while most of us can’t imagine pickpocketing Jesus, we shortchange Him in a thousand different ways. We rob God of the glory He demands and deserves by not living up to our full, God-given potential.

I don’t think I’d have wanted to be around during a dark age. It’s odd, though. They had interstellar flight. And data retrieval and everything.” Gabe nodded. “None of it matters if you have an unstable society and tin-pot dictators. They had several hundred years of economic collapse. Widespread poverty. A few people at the top had all the money and influence. They had terrible overpopulation, struggles over water and resources. Civil wars. And widespread illiteracy.” The thirty-second to the thirty-ninth century. “It’s a wonder we survived.

What, then, should you do? With an excellent hand, you should bet: You lose nothing if your opponent folds, while giving yourself a good chance of winning a big pot if he calls. But with a middling hand, you shouldn't bet: If he has a bad hand, he'll fold, and you'll win the ante, which is what you'd have won anyway by checking; but if he has a good hand, he'll call and win. It's heads he wins, tails you don't. You should check instead, and hope your middling hand wins the ante. What about with a terrible hand? Should you check or bet? The answer is surprising. Checking would be unwise, because the hands will be compared and you will lose. It actually makes more sense to bet with these bad hands, because the only way he might drop out is if you make a bet. Perversely, you are better off betting with awful cards than with mediocre ones, the quintessential (and rational) bluff. There's a second reason for you to bet with terrible cards rather than middling ones: Your opponent will have to call a little more often. Because he knows that your bets are sometimes very weak, he can't afford to fold too easily. That means that when you bet with a good hand, you are more likely to be called, and to win when you are. Because you are bluffing with bad cards, your good hands make more money.

Less violent diversions can also be cited. An inspection of the pupils of Magdalen College, Oxford, in the very early years of the sixteenth century, revealed that ‘Stokes was unchaste with the wife of a tailor … Stokysley baptised a cat and practised witchcraft … Gregory climbed the great gate by the tower and brought a Stranger into College … Pots and cups are very seldom washed but are kept in such a dirty state that one shudders to drink out of them … Kyftyll played cards with the butler at Christmas time for money.’ Other students were accused of keeping as pets a ferret, a sparrowhawk and a weasel.

Marianne replaces the yogurt pot in the freezer now and asks Joanna if she finds it strange, to be paid for her hours at work—to exchange, in other words, blocks of her extremely limited time on this earth for the human invention known as money. It’s time you’ll never get back, Marianne adds. I mean, the time is real. The money is also real. Well, but the time is more real. Time consists of physics, money is

Answering the question 'How would you like to smell?' by saying 'I'd rather I didn't' is also no longer acceptable. It's not playing the game. Men are expected to put some cash into the cosmetic pot too - it's seen as almost un-feminist not to. What a uniquely capitalist response to that gender inequality: women have been forced by convention for generations - millennia - to spend money on expensive clothes and agonising shoes, to daub themselves with reality-concealing slap, to smell expensively inhuman, to self-mutilate in pursuit of eternal youth; and this, quite rightly, has come to be deemed unfair. But how do we end this hell? We make men do it too. Well done everyone.

According to voluminous Twitter postings the day of the shooting by Caitie Parker, one of Loughner’s friends since high school, he was “left wing,” “a political radical,” “quite liberal,” and “a pot head.”2 If any public figure influenced this guy, my money’s on Bill Maher.

This writing thing, it ain’t like that hip hop shit, City. For li’l niggas like you,” he told me, “this writing thing is like a gotdamn porta potty. It’s one li’l nigga at a time, shitting in the toilet, funking up the little space he get. And you shit a regular shit or a classic shit. Either way,” he said. “City, you gotta shit classic, then get your black ass on off the pot.” He actually grabbed my hand. “You probably think I’m hyping you just for the money. It ain’t just about the money. It’s really not. It’s about doing whatever it takes for you to have your voice heard. So I don’t know what you’re writing in that book you always carrying around, but it better be classic because you ain’t gonna get no two times to get it right, you hear me?

New Rule: Americans must realize what makes NFL football so great: socialism. That's right, the NFL takes money from the rich teams and gives it to the poorer one...just like President Obama wants to do with his secret army of ACORN volunteers. Green Bay, Wisconsin, has a population of one hundred thousand. Yet this sleepy little town on the banks of the Fuck-if-I-know River has just as much of a chance of making it to the Super Bowl as the New York Jets--who next year need to just shut the hell up and play. Now, me personally, I haven't watched a Super Bowl since 2004, when Janet Jackson's nipple popped out during halftime. and that split-second glimpse of an unrestrained black titty burned by eyes and offended me as a Christian. But I get it--who doesn't love the spectacle of juiced-up millionaires giving one another brain damage on a giant flatscreen TV with a picture so real it feels like Ben Roethlisberger is in your living room, grabbing your sister? It's no surprise that some one hundred million Americans will watch the Super Bowl--that's forty million more than go to church on Christmas--suck on that, Jesus! It's also eighty-five million more than watched the last game of the World Series, and in that is an economic lesson for America. Because football is built on an economic model of fairness and opportunity, and baseball is built on a model where the rich almost always win and the poor usually have no chance. The World Series is like The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. You have to be a rich bitch just to play. The Super Bowl is like Tila Tequila. Anyone can get in. Or to put it another way, football is more like the Democratic philosophy. Democrats don't want to eliminate capitalism or competition, but they'd like it if some kids didn't have to go to a crummy school in a rotten neighborhood while others get to go to a great school and their dad gets them into Harvard. Because when that happens, "achieving the American dream" is easy for some and just a fantasy for others. That's why the NFL literally shares the wealth--TV is their biggest source of revenue, and they put all of it in a big commie pot and split it thirty-two ways. Because they don't want anyone to fall too far behind. That's why the team that wins the Super Bowl picks last in the next draft. Or what the Republicans would call "punishing success." Baseball, on the other hand, is exactly like the Republicans, and I don't just mean it's incredibly boring. I mean their economic theory is every man for himself. The small-market Pittsburgh Steelers go to the Super Bowl more than anybody--but the Pittsburgh Pirates? Levi Johnston has sperm that will not grow and live long enough to see the Pirates in a World Series. Their payroll is $40 million; the Yankees' is $206 million. The Pirates have about as much chance as getting in the playoffs as a poor black teenager from Newark has of becoming the CEO of Halliburton. So you kind of have to laugh--the same angry white males who hate Obama because he's "redistributing wealth" just love football, a sport that succeeds economically because it does just that. To them, the NFL is as American as hot dogs, Chevrolet, apple pie, and a second, giant helping of apple pie.

Adam Smith, with his half-baked idea about a hidden hand that works the cotton looms, decides to use that as his central metaphor for unrestrained Free Market capitalism. You don’t need to regulate the banks or the financiers when there’s an invisible five-fingered regulator who’s a bit like God to make sure that the money-looms don’t snare or tangle. That’s the monetarist mystic idol-shit, the voodoo economics Ronald Regan put his faith in, and that middle-class dunce Margaret Thatcher when they cheerily deregulated most of the financial institutions. And that’s why the Boroughs exists, Adam Smith’s idea. That’s why the last fuck knows how many generations of this family are a toilet queue without a pot to piss in, and that’s why everyone we know is broke. It’s all there in the current underneath that bridge down Tanner Street. That was the first one, the first dark, satanic mill.

It’s ironic perhaps – but no one wants to lend money to someone or something that has no money or no monetary worth. You wouldn’t plant a seed on barren ground – you plant a seed where there’s already a wealth of resources sufficient to cultivate the seed. It could be a tiny bit of soil in a pot, or the expanse of your front yard. But you’re going to make sure the seed has enough soil to put down roots and a quality of soil that facilitates growth.

You take my hand and I'm suddenly in a bad movie, it goes on and on and why am I fascinated We waltz in slow motion through an air stale with aphorisms we meet behind endless potted palms you climb through the wrong windows Other people are leaving but I always stay till the end I paid my money, I want to see what happens. In chance bathtubs I have to peel you off me in the form of smoke and melted celluloid Have to face it I'm finally an addict, the smell of popcorn and worn plush lingers for weeks

A tiny flat it is, high up among the chimney pots, two rooms and a tiny kitchen and a bathroom all my very own. I have tried to make it bright with distempered walls, and gaily colored chintz, but the smuts of London wage a continual war upon cleanliness and brightness, and I have neither the time nor the money to fight them with success. Mrs. Cope, my “daily woman,” comes in and does battle while I am at my work, but although she uses an incredible quantity of cleaning material—the sinews of her war—the result is indecisive, to say the least of

He fell into a stillness then, remembering clenched fists, and sit-ins, and pot smoke wafting on the breeze. And power to the people. And the hope, the abiding expectation, that things could be better, that you could, if you wanted it bad enough, if you worked for it hard enough, force this old world to change. Where did it all go? he wondered. When did it all change? When did we all get so small? . . . It wasn't so long ago, explained Malcolm, that you and I wouldn't have been here arguing over who was the bigger victim. It wasn't so long ago that white guys just like you were putting themselves on the line, and even dying, because they knew that unless everybody was free, nobody was. I just wonder sometimes, how we got from people like that to people like you. . . . Small-minded people. Hateful, closed-minded, self-righteous, damned ignorant, and proud of it. We were not like that. And white people were not like that, when I was your age. . . . Yeah, he said, there was drugs and there was sex, but there was also vision. We had ambition, not for making money, but for making a difference.

In the 1930s, the Nazis borrowed the frugal image of the one-pot meal, putting it to ideological use. In 1933, Hitler’s government announced that Germans should put aside one Sunday, from October to March, to eat a one-pot meal: Eintopf. The idea was that people would save enough money in this way to donate whatever was saved to the poor. Cookbooks were hastily rewritten to take account of the new policy. One recipe collection listed no fewer than sixty-nine Eintopfs, including macaroni, goulash, Irish stew, Serbian rice soup, numerous cabbagey medleys, and Old German potato soup.

It was all still there, an immense quilt of bold, fantastical human will: the faded tawny golds and grays of the descending rooftops and scorched chimney pots, the cold steel-blue river with its fabled Left and Right Banks, the towers and steeples and crooked cobblestone streets, bisected by wide, brutish boulevards. As seductive as a mirage, but every slab of stone, every silent or uproarious inch of it, real. She had not returned triumphant as a brilliant painter or a self-made woman whose only worry about money was how to spend it ... but she had come back to Paris anyway. It was hard to imagine being unhappy here.

I know he accused Nick of making me dependent on him for everything, which is the pot calling up the kettle to have a long talk about being black. My mom loved Nick, but right or wrong, my parents had spent my life making me think that I couldn’t do anything without them. At twenty-one years old, I was still very much a child. I didn’t know how to write a check, but, somehow, I was paying for everything. I knew that I was making money, but I didn’t think of myself as the family breadwinner. I just thought my money was their money. Honestly, what I knew for sure was that it stopped my family from having as many fights, so I felt lucky that I could be the one to help keep the peace.

The Arab world has done nothing to help the Palestinian refugees they created when they attacked Israel in 1948. It’s called the ‘Palestinian refugee problem.’ This is one of the best tricks that the Arabs have played on the world, and they have used it to their great advantage when fighting Israel in the forum of public opinion. This lie was pulled off masterfully, and everyone has been falling for it ever since. First you tell people to leave their homes and villages because you are going to come in and kick out the Jews the day after the UN grants Israel its nationhood. You fail in your military objective, the Jews are still alive and have more land now than before, and you have thousands of upset, displaced refugees living in your country because they believed in you. So you and the UN build refugee camps that are designed to last only five years and crowd the people in, instead of integrating them into your society and giving them citizenship. After a few years of overcrowding and deteriorating living conditions, you get the media to visit and publish a lot of pictures of these poor people living in the hopeless, wretched squalor you have left them in. In 1967 you get all your cronies together with their guns and tanks and planes and start beating the war drums. Again the same old story: you really are going to kill all the Jews this time or drive them into the sea, and everyone will be able to go back home, take over what the Jews have developed, and live in a Jew-free Middle East. Again you fail and now there are even more refugees living in your countries, and Israel is even larger, with Jerusalem as its capital. Time for more pictures of more camps and suffering children. What is to be done about these poor refugees (that not even the Arabs want)? Then start Middle Eastern student organizations on U.S. college campuses and find some young, idealistic American college kids who have no idea of what has been described here so far, and have them take up the cause. Now enter some power-hungry type like Yasser Arafat who begins to blackmail you and your Arab friends, who created the mess, for guns and bombs and money to fight the Israelis. Then Arafat creates hell for the world starting in the 1970s with his terrorism, and the “Palestinian refugee problem” becomes a worldwide issue and galvanizes all your citizens and the world against Israel. Along come the suicide bombers, so to keep the pot boiling you finance the show by paying every bomber’s family twenty-five thousand dollars. This encourages more crazies to go blow themselves up, killing civilians and children riding buses to school. Saudi Arabia held telethons to raise thousands of dollars to the families of suicide bombers. What a perfect way to turn years of military failure into a public-opinion-campaign success. The perpetuation of lies and uncritical thinking, combined with repetitious anti-Jewish and anti-American diatribes, has produced a generation of Arab youth incapable of thinking in a civilized manner. This government-nurtured rage toward the West and the infidels continues today, perpetuating their economic failure and deflecting frustration away from the dictators and regimes that oppress them. This refusal by the Arab regimes to take an honest look at themselves has created a culture of scapegoating that blames western civilization for misery and failure in every aspect of Arab life. So far it seems that Arab leaders don’t mind their people lagging behind, save for King Abdullah’s recent evidence of concern. (The depth of his sincerity remains to be seen.)

You're no different than the rest of us, Victor. We all see ourselves as this dissatisfied thing, this ego, looking outside ourselves for just that one other thing that will make us complete. That job, that lover, that pot of money. Even enlightenment, as if that too is a thing we can grab hold of to complete what needs completing. There is always something, we believe, that will make us whole. But if you take a finite thing, like body and mind, and look for something outside it to make it complete, something like money or love or faith, what you are seeking is also just a finite thing. So you have a finite thing reaching for the infinite by grabbing for some other finite thing and you end up with nothing more than a deeper sense of dissatisfaction.

He had taken up some bricks in his floor underneath his loom, and here he had made a hole in which he set the iron pot that contained his guineas and silver coins, covering the bricks with sand whenever he replaced them. Not that the idea of being robbed presented itself often or strongly to his mind: hoarding was common in country districts in those days; there were old labourers in the parish of Raveloe who were known to have their savings by them, probably inside their flock-beds; but their rustic neighbours, though not all of them as honest as their ancestors in the days of King Alfred, had not imaginations bold enough to lay a plan of burglary. How could they have spent the money in their own village without betraying themselves? They would be obliged to “run away” — a course as dark and dubious as a balloon journey.

Hope, though; now there’s a real pest. Hope doesn’t just nibble your cheese and chew holes in your skirting boards. Hope keeps you plodding on when it really is time to call it quits. Hope drags you to sixteen auditions in a single day, when there’s a nice job in your brother-in-law’s tannery just waiting for you. Hope keeps you going in Old Stairs or Paradise, even though there’s no money and nothing to eat and the landlord just took your chair and your chamber pot. Personally, I can see no great merit in simply being alive if you’re miserable and in pain, but Hope won’t let you go. She’s a tease, like bad children teasing a dumb animal, and I’ve made a point of avoiding her whenever I can. Still, sometimes she runs you down and there’s nowhere left for you to go. You can turn and fight her and lose, or let her scoop you up and turn your brain to mush. Hope against hope. We had human chains shifting those blocks with levers and rollers, through the narrow alleys where carts couldn’t go. We had shifts digging the ditch by lamplight, in the rain. And in every working party there was at least one man who cheerfully announced that it wasn’t going to work, the whole idea was stupid, the enemy’ll find a way round this in two shakes, just you see; and even he didn’t really believe it, because of Hope. Hope turns a hundred men and women ripping the skin off their hands on a coarse hemp rope into a street party. Someone tells a joke, or clowns around, or starts singing a favourite song from one of the shows, and Hope bursts through, like sappers, and next thing you know she’s everywhere, like smoke, or floodwater, or rats. We’re going to beat Ogus, she whispers in every ear, and this time it’ll be different.

I began braising and stewing solo, regularly devoting my Sunday afternoons to cooking various pot dishes on my own. The idea was to make a couple of dinners at a time and freeze them to eat during the week: my own home-meal replacements, homemade. Weeknights, it’s often hard to find more than a half hour or so to fix dinner, so I decided to put in a few hours on the weekend, when I would feel less rushed. I also borrowed a couple of minor mass-production techniques from the food industry: I figured that if I was going to chop onions for a mirepoix or soffritto, why not chop enough for two or three dishes? That way, I’d only have to wash the pans, knives, and cutting boards once. Making pot dishes in this way has proved to be the single most practical and sustainable skill—both in terms of money and time spent to eat well—I acquired in my cooking education.

Cordelia – “Why so rough?” Aral – “It’s very poor. It was the town center during the time Isolation. And it hasn’t been touched by renovation, minimal water, no electricity choked with refuse.” “Mostly human,” added Peoter tartly. “Poor?” Asked Cordelia bewildered. “No electricity? How can it be on the comm network?” “It’s not of course,” answered Vorkosigan. “Then how can anyone get their schooling?” Cordelia “They don’t.” Cordelia stared. “I don’t understand, how do they get their jobs?” “A few escape to the service, the rest prey on each other mostly.” Vorkosigan regarded her face uneasily. “Have you no poverty on Beta colony?” “Poverty? Well some people have more money than others, but no comm consuls…?” Vorkosigan was diverted from his interrogation. “Is not owning a comm consul the lowest standard of living you can imagine?” He said in wonder. “It’s the first article in the constitution! ‘Access to information shall not be abridged.’” “Cordelia, these people barely have access to food, clothing and shelter. They have a few rags and cooking pots and squat in buildings that aren’t economical to repair or tear down yet with the wind whistling through the walls.” “No air conditioning?” “No heat in the winter is a bigger problem here.” “I suppose so. You people don’t really have summer. How do they call for help when they are sick or hurt?” “What help?” Vorkosigan was growing grim. “If they’re sick they either get well or die.” “Die if we’re lucking” muttered Veoter. “You’re not joking.” She stared back and forth between the pair of them. “Why, think of all the geniuses you must missing!” “I doubt we must be missing very many from the Caravanceri.” Said Peoter dryly. “Why not? They have the same genetic compliment as you.” Cordelia pointed out the – to her -obvious. The Count went rigid. “My dear girl, they most certainly do not. My family has been Vor for nine generations.” Cordelia raised her eyebrows. “How do you know if you didn’t have the gene-typing until 80 years ago?” Both the guard commander and the footman were acquiring peculiar stuffed expressions. The footman bit his lip. “Besides,” she pointed out reasonably, “If you Vor got around half as much as those histories I’ve been reading imply. 90% of the people on this planet must have Vor blood by now. Who knows who your relatives are on your father’s side. Vorkosigan bit his napkin absently. His eyes gone crinkly with much the same expression as the footman and muttered, “Cordelia, you really can’t sit at the breakfast table and imply my ancestors were bastards. It’s a mortal insult here.” “Where should I sit? Oh I’ll never understand.

Shouldn't we get up?" With unexpected strength,he grabbed her waist and rolled her over at the same time, poisitioning her so that she was astride him. "I don't think so." Bronwyn licked her lips. "It is Saint Stephen's Day. The people will be waiting." "For their pots full of money." "So you know the custom," she purred, letting her fingers play with the hairs on his chest. "Of course," he groaned. "I ordered the clay pots as soon as we got back after we went hunting.I'll pass them out tonight." "Did you know that you,too,get a present?" Bronwyn asked as she leaned down to kiss his naval, smiling with delight as his stomach contracted. Ranulf grinned back. "Really?And just what is in my clay pot?" "Your present doesn't come in a pot," she purred, smiling as her hand slowly moved lower,making a trail for her mouth and tongue to follow. "And even more lucky,you don't have to wait until tonight either.

Sit near someone who has had the experience. Sit under a tree with new blossoms. Walking the section of the market where chemists sell essences, you will receive conflicting advice. Go toward kindness. If you are not sure where that is, you will be drawn in by fakes. They will take your money and sit you down on their doorstep saying, I’ll be right back. But they have another door they leave by. Do not dip your cup in a pot just because it has reached the simmering point. Not every reed is sugarcane. Not every under has an over. Not every eye can see. Or it may be you cannot thread the needle because it already has thread in it. Your loving alertness is a lantern. Keep it protected from wind that makes it crazy. Instead of that airy commotion live in the water that gently cools as it flows. Be a helpful friend, and you will become a green tree with always new fruit, always deeper journeys into love.

So much we once coveted. So much That would have saved us, but lived, Instead, its own quick span, returning To uselessness with the mute acquiescence Of shed skin. It watches us watch it: Our faulty eyes, our telltale heat, hearts Ticking through our shirts. We’re here To titter at gimcracks, the naïve tools, The replicas of replicas stacked like bricks. There’s green money, and oil in drums. Pots of honey pilfered from a tomb. Books Recounting the wars, maps of fizzled stars. In the south wing, there’s a small room Where a living man sits on display. Ask, And he’ll describe the old beliefs. If you Laugh, he’ll lower his head to his hands And sigh. When he dies, they’ll replace him With a video looping on ad infinitum. Special installations come and go. “Love” Was up for a season, followed by “Illness,” Concepts difficult to grasp. The last thing you see (After a mirror—someone’s idea of a joke?) Is an image of an old planet taken from space. Outside, vendors hawk t-shirts, three for eight.

may sound strange to American readers that by “eating their own lambs” the Heddles were breaking the law. The fact is that during the war, and for several years after, the people of Britain were strictly rationed. Each person was provided with a book containing coupons for food and clothing. Rationed food included meat, eggs, bacon, cheese, sugar, tea, butter, and fats, etc., etc. The coupons were given up every week for the food. In this way everyone was able to obtain a fair share of the very limited supply of necessary food. Greedy people who had no conscience and plenty of money were able to obtain extra food “under the counter” but the law was strictly enforced. Even farmers were not allowed to kill and eat their own animals, so by killing and eating their lambs the Heddles were liable to severe penalties. The rations allowed by law were very frugal and everybody lost weight but it did us no harm and we were doing it as part of the war effort so nobody grumbled. Many factories in Britain were requisitioned to make precision instruments and other articles which were needed for the war so it soon became impossible to buy clocks and kettles and pots and pans and hairpins. D.

We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires, and to see if we could not learn what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died. We wanted to dig deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to be overworked and reduced to our last wit. And if our bosses proved mean, why then we’d evoke their whole and genuine meanness afterward over vodka cranberries and small batch bourbons. And if our drinking companions proved to be sublime then we would stagger home at dawn over the Old City cobblestones, into hot showers and clean shirts, and press onward until dusk fell again. For the rest of the world, it seemed to us, had somewhat hastily concluded that it was the chief end of man to thank God it was Friday and pray that Netflix would never forsake them. Still we lived frantically, like hummingbirds; though our HR departments told us that our commitments were valuable and our feedback was appreciated, our raises would be held back another year. Like gnats we pestered Management— who didn’t know how to use the Internet, whose only use for us was to set up Facebook accounts so they could spy on their children, or to sync their iPhones to their Outlooks, or to explain what tweets were and more importantly, why— which even we didn’t know. Retire! we wanted to shout. We ha Get out of the way with your big thumbs and your senior moments and your nostalgia for 1976! We hated them; we wanted them to love us. We wanted to be them; we wanted to never, ever become them. Complexity, complexity, complexity! We said let our affairs be endless and convoluted; let our bank accounts be overdrawn and our benefits be reduced. Take our Social Security contributions and let it go bankrupt. We’d been bankrupt since we’d left home: we’d secure our own society. Retirement was an afterlife we didn’t believe in and that we expected yesterday. Instead of three meals a day, we’d drink coffee for breakfast and scavenge from empty conference rooms for lunch. We had plans for dinner. We’d go out and buy gummy pad thai and throat-scorching chicken vindaloo and bento boxes in chintzy, dark restaurants that were always about to go out of business. Those who were a little flush would cover those who were a little short, and we would promise them coffees in repayment. We still owed someone for a movie ticket last summer; they hadn’t forgotten. Complexity, complexity. In holiday seasons we gave each other spider plants in badly decoupaged pots and scarves we’d just learned how to knit and cuff links purchased with employee discounts. We followed the instructions on food and wine Web sites, but our soufflés sank and our baked bries burned and our basil ice creams froze solid. We called our mothers to get recipes for old favorites, but they never came out the same. We missed our families; we were sad to be rid of them. Why shouldn’t we live with such hurry and waste of life? We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to decrypt our neighbors’ Wi-Fi passwords and to never turn on the air-conditioning. We vowed to fall in love: headboard-clutching, desperate-texting, hearts-in-esophagi love. On the subways and at the park and on our fire escapes and in the break rooms, we turned pages, resolved to get to the ends of whatever we were reading. A couple of minutes were the day’s most valuable commodity. If only we could make more time, more money, more patience; have better sex, better coffee, boots that didn’t leak, umbrellas that didn’t involute at the slightest gust of wind. We were determined to make stupid bets. We were determined to be promoted or else to set the building on fire on our way out. We were determined to be out of our minds.

I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and bluster. The boys who stood out on Garrison and Liberty up on Park Heights loved this music because it told them, against all evidence and odds, that they were masters of their own lives, their own streets, and their own bodies. I saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over. And I saw it in their brutal language and hard gaze, how they would cut you with their eyes and destroy you with their words for the sin of playing too much. “Keep my name out your mouth,” they would say. I would watch them after school, how they squared off like boxers, vaselined up, earrings off, Reeboks on, and leaped at each other. I felt the fear in the visits to my Nana’s home in Philadelphia. You never knew her. I barely knew her, but what I remember is her hard manner, her rough voice. And I knew that my father’s father was dead and that my uncle Oscar was dead and that my uncle David was dead and that each of these instances was unnatural. And I saw it in my own father, who loves you, who counsels you, who slipped me money to care for you. My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that is exactly what was happening all around us. Everyone had lost a child, somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to guns. It was said that these lost girls were sweet as honey and would not hurt a fly. It was said that these lost boys had just received a GED and had begun to turn their lives around. And now they were gone, and their legacy was a great fear. Have they told you this story? When your grandmother was sixteen years old a young man knocked on her door. The young man was your Nana Jo’s boyfriend. No one else was home. Ma allowed this young man to sit and wait until your Nana Jo returned. But your great-grandmother got there first. She asked the young man to leave. Then she beat your grandmother terrifically, one last time, so that she might remember how easily she could lose her body. Ma never forgot. I remember her clutching my small hand tightly as we crossed the street. She would tell me that if I ever let go and were killed by an onrushing car, she would beat me back to life. When I was six, Ma and Dad took me to a local park. I slipped from their gaze and found a playground. Your grandparents spent anxious minutes looking for me. When they found me, Dad did what every parent I knew would have done—he reached for his belt. I remember watching him in a kind of daze, awed at the distance between punishment and offense. Later, I would hear it in Dad’s voice—“Either I can beat him, or the police.” Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn’t. All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke from a fire, and I cannot say whether that violence, even administered in fear and love, sounded the alarm or choked us at the exit. What I know is that fathers who slammed their teenage boys for sass would then release them to streets where their boys employed, and were subject to, the same justice. And I knew mothers who belted their girls, but the belt could not save these girls from drug dealers twice their age. We, the children, employed our darkest humor to cope. We stood in the alley where we shot basketballs through hollowed crates and cracked jokes on the boy whose mother wore him out with a beating in front of his entire fifth-grade class. We sat on the number five bus, headed downtown, laughing at some girl whose mother was known to reach for anything—cable wires, extension cords, pots, pans. We were laughing, but I know that we were afraid of those who loved us most. Our parents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague years resorted to the scourge.

This is painfully obvious at a poker table. Even weak players know, in principle, that seeing through the eyes of opponents is critical. She raised the bet $20? What does that tell me about her thinking—and the cards she has? Each bet is another clue to what your opponent is holding, or wants you to think she is holding, and the only way to piece it together is to imagine yourself in her seat. Good perspective-takers can make a lot of money. So you might suppose that anyone who takes poker seriously would get good at it, quickly, or take up another hobby. And yet they so often don’t. “Here’s a very simple example,” says Annie Duke, an elite professional poker player, winner of the World Series of Poker, and a former PhD-level student of psychology. “Everyone who plays poker knows you can either fold, call, or raise [a bet]. So what will happen is that when a player who isn’t an expert sees another player raise, they automatically assume that that player is strong, as if the size of the bet is somehow correlated at one with the strength of the other person’s hand.” This is a mistake. Duke teaches poker and to get her students to see like dragonflies she walks them through a game situation. A hand is dealt. You like your cards. In the first of several rounds of betting, you wager a certain amount. The other player immediately raises your bet substantially. Now, what do you think the other player has? Duke has taught thousands of students “and universally, they say ‘I think they have a really strong hand.’” So then she asks them to imagine the same situation, except they’re playing against her. The cards are dealt. Their hand is more than strong—it’s unbeatable. Duke makes her bet. Now, what will you do? Will you raise her bet? “And they say to me, ‘Well, no.’” If they raise, Duke may conclude their hand is strong and fold. They don’t want to scare her off. They want Duke to stay in for each of the rounds of betting so they can expand the pot as much as possible before they scoop it up. So they won’t raise. They’ll only call. Duke then walks them through the same hypothetical with a hand that is beatable but still very strong. Will you raise? No. How about a little weaker hand that is still a likely winner? No raise. “They would never raise with any of these really great hands because they don’t want to chase me away.” Then Duke asks them: Why did you assume that an opponent who raises the bet has a strong hand if you would not raise with the same strong hand? “And it’s not until I walk them through the exercise,” Duke says, that people realize they failed to truly look at the table from the perspective of their opponent. If Duke’s students were all vacationing retirees trying poker for the first time, this would only tell us that dilettantes tend to be naive. But “these are people who have played enough poker, and are passionate about the game, and consider themselves good enough, that they’re paying a thousand dollars for a seminar with me,” Duke says. “And they don’t understand this basic concept.”22

Elvis was pretty slick. Nonetheless, I knew that he was cheating. His four-of-a-kind would beat my full house. I had two choices. I could fold my hand and lose all the money I’d contributed to the pot, or I could match Elvis’s bet and continue to play. If a gambler thought he was in an honest game, he would probably match the bet thinking his full house was a sure winner. The con artist would bet large amounts of money on the remaining cards, knowing he had a winning hand. I narrowed my eyes and pursed my lips, as if struggling to decide whether to wager five hundred pesos or fold my hand and call it quits. I knew there were five men between me and the door and watched them from the corner of my eye. Even if I folded and accepted my losses, I knew they would not let me leave without taking all my cash. They had strength in numbers and would strong arm me if they could. The men stared, intently watching my next move. I set down my beer and took five one hundred peso notes from my wallet. The men at the bar relaxed. My adrenaline surged, pumping through my brain, sharpening my focus as I prepared for action. I moved as if to place my bet on the table, but instead my hand bumped my beer bottle, spilling it onto Elvis’ lap. Elvis reacted instinctively to the cold beer, pushing back from the table and rising to his feet. I jumped up from my chair making a loud show of apologizing, and in the ensuing pandemonium I snatched all the money off the table and bolted for the door! My tactics took everyone by complete surprise. I had a small head start, but the Filipinos recovered quickly and scrambled to cut off my escape. I dashed to the door and barely made it to the exit ahead of the Filipinos. The thugs were nearly upon me when I suddenly wheeled round and kicked the nearest man square in the chest. My kick cracked ribs and launched the shocked Filipino through the air into the other men, tumbling them to the ground. For the moment, my assailants were a jumble of tangled bodies on the floor. I darted out the door and raced down the busy sidewalk, dodging pedestrians. I looked back and saw the furious Filipinos swarming out of the bar. Running full tilt, I grabbed onto the rail of a passing Jeepney and swung myself into the vehicle. The wide-eyed passengers shrunk back, trying to keep their distance from the crazy American. I yelled to the driver, “Step on the gas!” and thrust a hundred peso note into his hand. I looked back and saw all six of Johnny’s henchmen piling onto one tricycle. The jeepney driver realized we were being pursued and stomped the gas pedal to the floor. The jeepney surged into traffic and accelerated away from the tricycle. The tricycle was only designed for one driver and two passengers. With six bodies hanging on, the overloaded motorcycle was slow and unstable. The motorcycle driver held the throttle wide open and the tricycle rocked side to side, almost tipping over, as the frustrated riders yelled curses and flailed their arms futilely. My jeepney continued to speed through the city, pulling away from our pursuers. Finally, I could no longer see the tricycle behind us. When I was sure I had escaped, I thanked the driver and got off at the next stop. I hired a tricycle of my own and carefully made my way back to my neighborhood, keeping careful watch for Johnny and his friends. I knew that Johnny was in a frustrated rage. Not only had I foiled his plans, I had also made off with a thousand pesos of his cash. Even though I had great fun and came out of my escapade in good shape, my escape was risky and could’ve had a very different outcome. I feel a disclaimer is appropriate for those people who think it is fun to con street hustlers, “Kids. Don’t try this at home.

She knew she was delaying the inevitable- trying to locate Agnete's address- but decided to make a list of things to buy first, looking for shops close to the hotel and purposefully ignoring her uncertain finances. She dunked a sopaipilla in her coffee and brushed powdered sugar from her lips, the plate of chile-flecked fried polenta, chorizo, and eggs already finished. It might not have been a vacation, but it felt like one. She was on her own, eating strange foods, planning to spend money she wasn't sure she had, and no one was paying the slightest bit of attention to her. She had fallen down the rabbit hole. It was easiest to come up with ideas for Saisee, whose pride in her cooking shone in everything she concocted, tossing in a pinch of this and a smidgen of that. Alice had even watched her hold crushed spices in the palm of her hand and blow them gently over the pot. 'My momma taught me that. Best way to get flavor to every part of the pot.' For here there would be white posole and blue cornmeal, a collection of chile powders, and piloncillo, the little cones of unrefined Mexican sugars Alice imagined she might use to make caramelized custard.

God damn you!” Alfred said. “You belong in jail!” The turd wheezed with laughter as it slid very slowly down the wall, its viscous pseudopods threatening to drip on the sheets below. “Seems to me,” it said, “you anal retentive type personalities want everything in jail. Like, little kids, bad news, man, they pull your tchotchkes off your shelves, they drop food on the carpet, they cry in theaters, they miss the pot. Put ’em in the slammer! And Polynesians, man, they track sand in the house, get fish juice on the furniture, and all those pubescent chickies with their honkers exposed? Jail ’em! And how about ten to twenty, while we’re at it, for every horny little teenager, I mean talk about insolence, talk about no restraint. And Negroes (sore topic, Fred?), I’m hearing rambunctious shouting and interesting grammar, I’m smelling liquor of the malt variety and sweat that’s very rich and scalpy, and all that dancing and whoopee-making and singers that coo like body parts wetted with saliva and special jellies: what’s a jail for if not to toss a Negro in it? And your Caribbeans with their spliffs and their potbelly toddlers and their like daily barbecues and ratborne hanta viruses and sugary drinks with pig blood at the bottom? Slam the cell door, eat the key. And the Chinese, man, those creepy-ass weird-name vegetables like homegrown dildos somebody forgot to wash after using, one-dollah, one-dollah, and those slimy carps and skinned-alive songbirds, and come on, like, puppy-dog soup and pooty-tat dumplings and female infants are national delicacies, and pork bung, by which we’re referring here to the anus of a swine, presumably a sort of chewy and bristly type item, pork bung’s a thing Chinks pay money for to eat? What say we just nuke all billion point two of ’em, hey? Clean that part of the world up already. And let’s not forget about women generally, nothing but a trail of Kleenexes and Tampaxes everywhere they go. And your fairies with their doctor’s-office lubricants, and your Mediterraneans with their whiskers and their garlic, and your French with their garter belts and raunchy cheeses, and your blue-collar ball-scratchers with their hot rods and beer belches, and your Jews with their circumcised putzes and gefilte fish like pickled turds, and your Wasps with their Cigarette boats and runny-assed polo horses and go-to-hell cigars? Hey, funny thing, Fred, the only people that don’t belong in your jail are upper-middle-class northern European men. And you’re on my case for wanting

The Clintons believed that a magic royal pot of money somehow existed for their every whim.

Economics is a notoriously complicated subject. To make things easier, let’s imagine a simple example. Samuel Greedy, a shrewd financier, founds a bank in El Dorado, California. A. A. Stone, an up-and-coming contractor in El Dorado, finishes his first big job, receiving payment in cash to the tune of $1 million. He deposits this sum in Mr Greedy’s bank. The bank now has $1 million in capital. In the meantime, Jane McDoughnut, an experienced but impecunious El Dorado chef, thinks she sees a business opportunity – there’s no really good bakery in her part of town. But she doesn’t have enough money of her own to buy a proper facility complete with industrial ovens, sinks, knives and pots. She goes to the bank, presents her business plan to Greedy, and persuades him that it’s a worthwhile investment. He issues her a $1 million loan, by crediting her account in the bank with that sum. McDoughnut now hires Stone, the contractor, to build and furnish her bakery. His price is $1,000,000. When she pays him, with a cheque drawn on her account, Stone deposits it in his account in the Greedy bank. So how much money does Stone have in his bank account? Right, $2 million. How much money, cash, is actually located in the bank’s safe? Yes, $1 million. It doesn’t stop there. As contractors are wont to do, two months into the job Stone informs McDoughnut that, due to unforeseen problems and expenses, the bill for constructing the bakery will actually be $2 million. Mrs McDoughnut is not pleased, but she can hardly stop the job in the middle. So she pays another visit to the bank, convinces Mr Greedy to give her an additional loan, and he puts another $1 million in her account. She transfers the money to the contractor’s account. How much money does Stone have in his account now? He’s got $3 million. But how much money is actually sitting in the bank? Still just $1 million. In fact, the same $1 million that’s been in the bank all along. Current US banking law permits the bank to repeat this exercise seven more times. The contractor would eventually have $10 million in his account, even though the bank still has but $1 million in its vaults. Banks are allowed to loan $10 for every dollar they actually possess, which means that 90 per cent of all the money in our bank accounts is not covered by actual coins and notes.2 If all of the account holders at Barclays Bank suddenly demand their money, Barclays will promptly collapse (unless the government steps in to save it). The same is true of Lloyds, Deutsche Bank, Citibank, and all other banks in the world. It sounds like a giant Ponzi scheme, doesn’t it? But if it’s a fraud, then the entire modern economy is a fraud. The fact is, it’s not a deception, but rather a tribute to the amazing abilities of the human imagination. What enables banks – and the entire economy – to survive and flourish is our trust in the future. This trust is the sole backing for most of the money in the world.

the community developed what was called the kezazah ceremony (the cutting-off ceremony).8 Any Jewish boy who lost his inheritance among Gentiles faced the ceremony if he dared return to his home village. The ceremony itself was simple. Fellow villagers would fill a large earthenware pot with burned nuts and burned corn and break it in front of the guilty individual. While doing this, they would shout, "So-and-so is cut off from his people." From that point on, the village would have nothing to do with the hapless lad. As he leaves town, the prodigal knows he must not lose his money among the Gentiles.

The way the All-Night worked at the moment was Batu’s idea. They sized up the customers before they got to the counter—that had always been part of retail. If the customer was the right sort, then Batu or Eric gave the customer what they said they needed, and the customer paid with money sometimes, and sometimes with other things: pot, books on tape, souvenir maple syrup tins. They were near the border. They got a lot of Canadians. Eric suspected someone, maybe a traveling Canadian pajama salesman, was supplying Batu with novelty pajamas

Event planners dropped the ball on costs. One Rose Garden event required big, rented, air-conditioned tents that ruined the lawn. Landscaping crews and the National Park Service tore up all the dead grass, installed new sod, and sent them the bill. That’s expensive. But you can’t just have a whole White House lawn muddy and looking like crap. “Just get it done,” staffers would say. Party rental companies refused future events until they were paid. The discussions were plain embarrassing, but when I heard them I wasn’t eavesdropping. They were shouted in the hallway. The Clintons believed that a magic royal pot of money somehow existed for their every whim.

Batteries, Bug repellent, Belts, Bags , Barbecue equipment, Boots, Bath towels. Bikes, Bike rack. C - Cash and credit cards, Cell phones & chargers, Camera and film/memory cards, Coffee pot, Can opener, Cups, Cutlery, Computer, Clock, Cleaning utensils, Clothes and coats, Camping Guides, Condiments (salt, sugar, pepper). D - Dishes, Drainers, Disinfectant. F - First Aid kit, Fire Extinguishers G - Glasses, (drinking, reading, sun), Games. H -Herbs, Hair brushes, Headphones. K -Keys (house, RV, Lockers), Kindle & cable, Kitchen Gadgets. M - Medication. Money belts, Measuring implements, Maps, P - PERSONAL DOCUMENTS: Passports, Health Certificates, Insurance, Driving License, RV documents, Power adapters, Pens, Pets:

DIVINE LIGHT,MURDEROUS LIGHT The flames crackle. On the pyre burn discarded mattresses, discarded easy chairs, discarded tires. A discarded god also burns: the fire blackens the body of Pol Pot. At the end of 1998, the man who killed with such abandon died at home, in his bed. No plague had ever so reduced the population of Cambodia. Invoking the sacred names of Marx, Lenin, and Mao, Pol Pot erected a colossal slaughterhouse. To save time and money, every charge came complete with sentence, and every jail had a door to a common grave. The entire country was a great burial mound and a temple to Pol Pot, who purified society to make it worthy of him. Revolutionary purity demanded liquidating the impure. The impure: those who thought, those who dissented, those who doubted, those who disobeyed.

It reminds me of the story of the guy sitting with firewood in his arms on a cold, freezing night. He is yelling at the pot-bellied stove, “When you give me some heat, then I’ll put some wood in you!” And when it comes to money, love, happiness, sales, and contacts, all one needs to remember is to give first.

With gambling or investing, if your gains are quick and easy, you will tend to keep the money in a separate mental account. So, if you subsequently lose it, you won't feel as upset as you'd think if you lost the money you brought to the casino. Yet, they are both pots of currency.

The stakes of the game were high if he continued. Kaoru wasn’t betting with something that could be easily replaced. It wasn’t just chips or money he was adding to the pot. He had his heart on the line. As fragile and finicky as it was, it was all he had to offer. Only a fool would look at an 8% possibility, and decide to wager his most precious possession on winning against the odds. But all skateboarders are fools, and Kaoru was about to prove that he was no exception.

Use up what you all have, trade, even pot luck dinners at home if you found your overspending was out to dinner too much.

Use up what you all have, trade, even pot luck dinners at home if you found your overspending was out to dinner too much. FIND YOUR TRIGGERS -UNSUBSCRIBE TO TEMPTING WEBSITES, EMAIL LISTS, Etc. TURN OFF NOTIFICATIONS FOR THEM AS WELL!

The process of co-parenting with a narcissistic ex can be challenging. It's hard for both parents to rebuild trust; it's easy for the children to question your motivations; therefore, the situation is costly, not only from lack of money going into a giant pot but also from all the therapy that needs to be done. Yet, despite the money, time, and energy to invest, it's still worth doing.

But pots of money do not equal happiness. No one actually believes that until they find themselves with spare money but not the things they actually want - love, companionship, respect - all of which are free.

Why do Southerners eat Black Eyed Peas on New Year’s Day? The story of the Southern tradition of eating black-eyed peas as the first meal on New Year's Day is generally believed to date back to the winter of 1864 - 1865. When Union General William T. Sherman led his invading troops on their destructive march through Georgia, the fields of black-eyed peas were largely left untouched because they were deemed fit only for animals. The Union foragers took everything, plundered the land, and left what they could not take, burning or in shambles. But two things did remain, the lowly peas and good Ol’ Southern salted pork. As a result, the humble yet nourishing black-eyed peas saved surviving Southerners - mainly women, children, elderly and the disabled veterans of the Confederate army - from mass starvation and were thereafter regarded as a symbol of good luck. The peas are said to represent good fortune. Certainly the starving Southern families and soldiers were fortunate to have those meager supplies. According to the tradition and folklore, the peas are served with several other dishes that symbolically represent good fortune, health, wealth, and prosperity in the coming year. Some folks still traditionally cook the black-eyed peas with a silver dime in the pot as a symbol of good fortune. Greens represent wealth and paper money. Any greens will do, but in the South the most popular are collards, mustard greens, turnip greens, and cabbage. Cornbread - a regular staple among Southerners in the absence of wheat - symbolizes gold and is very good for soaking up the juice from the greens on the plate. You should always have some cornbread on hand in your kitchen anyway. Good for dinner and in the morning with syrup. Pork symbolizes bountiful prosperity, and then progressing into the year ahead. Ham and hog jowls are typical with the New Year meal, though sometimes bacon will be used, too. Pigs root forward, so it’s the symbolic moving forward for the New Year. Tomatoes are often eaten with this meal as well. They represent health and wealth. So reflect on those stories when you sit down at your family table and enjoy this humble, uniquely Southern meal every New Year’s Day. Be thankful for what this year did give you in spite of the bad, and hope and pray for better days that are coming ahead for you.

If a lot of people are suffering because of a few people, why didn’t the majority do something about it a long time ago? Why’d everyone let it get so bad?” “If you drop a lobster in a pot of boiling water,” Zyrha tells him, “it’ll thrash around for its life.” “Wouldn’t we all?” Darrion smirks. “If you drop the lobster in a pot of cool water and slowly raise the temperature, it’ll die without a struggle. It’ll get used to the incremental increases until it’s too late to know it’s dead. You asked how we got here. The temperature had been rising in the Old States for a long time. People were dying left and right without a struggle. A few leaders had control over everything: money, power, the military, health care, schools, utilities, transportation, laws, courts, and the media. They had everything. Everything except the one thing every person in power needs.” “What’s that?” Darrion asks through a strained quiver. “An enemy.” “An enemy,” he repeats. “The question became which one. There were so many to choose from.” Zyrha claps her hands and gives a sarcastic laugh. “Black people. Brown people. Asians. Mexicans. Arabs. Women. The biracial. The multiracial. Old people. Young people. Short people. The overweight, the underweight, the sick, the helpless, the homeless, the unemployed. The asexual, the bisexual, the homosexual, the transgendered. People with special needs. The neurodivergent. Pot-smokers. Immigrants. Socialists. Communists. Atheists. Jews. Muslims. Intellectuals. Influencers. Athletes. Academics. Writers. Pacifists. Celebrities.” Zyrha pauses to draw in a long breath. “They were all contrived of course. They were invented enemies designed to occupy the amygdala—that’s the brain’s fear center—so the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for rational thought and good decision-making—wouldn’t take over. Anyway, there’d been a lot of manufactured enemies, and, frankly, they’d been done to death.

This is a capitalistic country, it was developed through the use of capital, and we who claim the right to partake of the blessings of freedom and opportunity, we who seek to accumulate riches here, may as well know that neither riches nor opportunity would be available to us if organized capital had not provided these benefits. For more than twenty years it has been a somewhat popular and growing pastime for radicals, self-seeking politicians, racketeers, crooked labor leaders, and on occasion religious leaders, to take pot-shots at “Wall Street, the money changers, and big business.” The practice became so general that we witnessed during the business depression, the unbelievable sight of high government officials lining up with the cheap politicians, and labor leaders, with the openly avowed purpose of throttling the system which has made Industrial America the richest country on earth. The line-up was so general and so well organized that it prolonged the worst depression America has ever known. It cost millions of men their jobs, because those jobs were inseparably a part of the industrial and capitalistic system which form the very backbone of the nation. During

Mass Mobilization of Youth Despite the well-founded dissatisfaction of the younger generation with the kind of life offered by the bloated affluence of megatechnic society, their very mode of rebellion too often demonstrates that the power system still has them in its grip: they, too mistake indolence for leisure and irresponsibility for liberation. The so-called Woodstock Festival was no spontaneous manifestation of joyous youth, but a strictly money-making enterprise, shrewdly calculated to exploit their rebellions, their adulations, and their illusions. The success of the festival was based ont he tropismic attraction of 'Big Name' singers and groups (the counter-culture's Personality Cult!), idols who command colossal financial rewards from personal appearances and the sales of their discs and films. With its mass mobilization of private cars and buses, its congestion of traffic en route, and its large-scale pollution of the environment, the Woodstock Festival mirrored and even grossly magnified the worst features of the system that many young rebels profess to reject, if not to destroy. The one positive achievement of this mass mobilization, apparently, was the warm sense of instant fellowship produced by the close physical contact of a hundred thousand bodies floating in the haze and daze of pot. Our present mass-minded, over-regimented, depersonalized culture has nothing to fear from this kind of reaction-equally regimented, equally depersonalized, equally under external control. What is this but the Negative Power Complex, attached by invisible electrodes to the same pecuniary pleasure center.

This was how we knew there was a moneyman—somebody funding the operation or delivering money on behalf of whoever was funding it. From here on out, the man would arrive at least once a week, bringing money and supplies for our captors. Once or twice, we saw him carrying a big pot of home-cooked food and leaving it for the boys. We nicknamed him Donald Trump.

That led through feasibility to successful pilot, to this gigantic system that you see now, which is utterly stunning. The way it works is this: When you get a phone that has M-Pesa, you basically have an extra menu in your phone, which says, “Send money.” If I wanted to send you some money, I would choose the menu on my phone which says, “Brett”; I put in the amount of money I want to send; I put in a PIN; I hit “okay”; and then you get a message on your phone. It looks like I’ve texted the money to you, but that’s not quite what’s happening under the hood. The text message is going to a central server, which moves the money from one pot to another pot within the M-Pesa central account, and then it sends you a text message. But, to the customer, it looks like the money’s gone from one phone to another by text.

Bonfills and Tammen were in the thick of all of this, castigating the corporate owners of the tramway and water company, blessing and damning the politicians, often in the same breath, getting shot and seriously wounded by a mad reader, and in and out of court on various libel matters. With a blow from behind, the pepper-pot Bonfills assaulted Senator Thomas M. Patterson, the owner of the Rocky Mountain News, and paid a fifty-dollar fine for his ever-excessive temper. But mad or calm, the paper made money hand over fist and lapped all of its rivals in circulation.

St. Lawrence River May 1705 Temperature 48 degrees From the river they walked back to the town, and the boy was taken into the fire circle outside the powwow’s longhouse. Here he was placed on the powwow’s sacred albino furs. A dozen men, those who were now his relatives, sat in a circle around him. The powwow lit a sacred pipe and passed it, and for the first time in his life, the boy smoked. Don’t cough, Mercy prayed for him. Don’t choke. Afterward she found out they diluted the tobacco with dried sumac leaves to make sure he wouldn’t cough on his first pull. Although the women had adopted him, it was the men who filed by to bring gifts. The new Indian son received a tomahawk, knives, a fine bow, a pot of vermilion paint, a beautiful black-and-white-striped pouch made from a skunk and several necklaces. “Watch, watch!” whispered Snow Walker, riveted. “This is his father. Look what his father gives him!” The warrior transferred from his own body to his son’s a wampum belt--hundreds of tiny shell circles linked together like white lace. The belt was so large it had to hang from the neck instead of the waist. To give a man a belt was old-fashioned. Wampum had no value to the French and had not been used as money by the Indians for many years. But it still spoke of power and honor and even Mercy caught her breath to see it on a white boy’s body. But of course, he was not white any longer. “My son,” said the powwow, “now you are flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone.” At last his real name was called aloud, and the name was plain: Annisquam, which just meant “Hilltop.” Perhaps they had caught him at the summit of a mountain. Or considering the honor of the wampum belt, perhaps he kept his eyes on the horizon and was a future leader. Or like Ruth, he might have done some great deed that would be told in story that evening. When the gifts and embraces were over, Annisquam was taken into the powwow’s longhouse to sit alone. He would stay there for many hours and would not be brought out until well into the dancing and feasting in the evening. Not one of Mercy’s questions had been answered. Was he, in his heart, adopted? Had he, in his heart, accepted these new parents? Where, in his heart, had he placed his English parents? How did he excuse himself to his English God and his English dead? The dancing began. Along with ancient percussion instruments that crackled and rattled, rasped and banged, the St. Francis Indians had French bells, whose clear chimes rang, and even a bugle, whose notes trumpeted across the river and over the trees.

A woman in Bower Bank, Jamaica, had eight children. The father was in jail in the United States, no longer sending remittances. Her fourteen-year-old daughter "get burn up from her face, breast, chest, down to her legs with boiling water February 2 1999. That night just because I never have any money earlier to cook, me go town and get a money, buy something to cook cause them never eat from morning. Me daughter bend down, to pick up something near the stove and bounce off the pot of boiling water pan herself. Me tek her to hospital and me never have the money fe register her. Me beg somebody the money and register her. Me owe the hospital $10,500 for the bill, a caan [can't] pay it. She's to go back for treatment because her hand caan stretch out or go up, but the hospital will not see her if I don't pay the bill.

On the way, Sister and Brother noticed a group of bears playing Christmas carols. They were collecting money for the needy in a big black pot. Brother and Sister looked at each other, dug into their pockets, and dropped all of their money into the pot. Mama and Papa smiled with pride.

Winning isn’t always measured in money. There will be times when one will lose money—sometimes a lot of it—but winning is much more than ledgers. In assessing our worth, look first to the bedrock of our lives: values, health, family, and friends. Dying is no fun, even if you leave behind a pot of gold. Family and friends are the lifeblood and legacy of our lives.

The waitress came by with a pot of black coffee. She was a smallish woman, about forty, still had some of her looks left, but she had a hardness to her face. Money and bad men were the only things that left that much stone in a woman. I nudged my cup in her direction, and she served her purpose in life.

I need more retweets, I need the favs, am I alive, etc., and I know people are like, shut up already, what are you, a narcissist, what are you, a woman, what are you, and the crux of it is I hate myself for having those thoughts and for wanting to write and for wanting attention. What this means is that I’ve lost the ability to not give a fuck and write. When I say “lost” I mean “I never had it”. This is not a bad thing at all but capitalist ideology posits solipsism as a triumph, an admirable thing, a wonderful starting point. Or maybe it’s both the starting point and the goal. You are supposed to not care. I know that this idea of not-caring-what-you-think-of-me needs to be historicised, raced, and gendered, before it can mean anything. Some of us get away with not-caring! Are rewarded handsomely, in fact! Make pots of money off of not-caring! And some of us care too much and then we die.

I want to sweeten Shankar’s pot. Give him a reason to keep his allegiance with us. I’ve already agreed to reimburse half his fee for today’s hunt. Now let’s give him a special pass into Sector C. I know he’s still one hunt short of membership, but I’m willing to give him that free ride if it keeps him quiet. If he doesn’t have the money, we’ll work out a deal. What I want from you is to be sure he’s ready. We can’t afford screw-ups like today’s over in C.

As soon as Mr. Clinton became the president, Mrs. Clinton and her staff sought to repair the Clinton brand among groups they thought had been damaged during the campaign, scheduling galas, balls, and dinners. They hosted open house tours day and night, especially around Christmas and for the military. What she and her staffers failed to realize was that the White House had a budget like any other government entity. Each shindig still had to be paid either from the Executive Residence budget or the Democratic Party’s purse. Event planners dropped the ball on costs. One Rose Garden event required big, rented, air-conditioned tents that ruined the lawn. Landscaping crews and the National Park Service tore up all the dead grass, installed new sod, and sent them the bill. That’s expensive. But you can’t just have a whole White House lawn muddy and looking like crap. “Just get it done,” staffers would say. Party rental companies refused future events until they were paid. The discussions were plain embarrassing, but when I heard them I wasn’t eavesdropping. They were shouted in the hallway. The Clintons believed that a magic royal pot of money somehow existed for their every whim.

The sun settled into the gray haze above the ocean. The day’s remaining vendors along the boardwalk sat bundled in jackets behind card tables piled with candles, tarot cards, and homemade trinkets. All of the crazies were gone except for one diehard who sat on a plastic crate and bellowed, “I need money. I gotta buy some pot.

And yet—and I expect I’m not the first person you’ve heard tell this tale—the “mo’ money” I made, the more miserable I became. Which led me to simply work harder and buy more toys on the misguided assumption that, sooner or later, all this effort was going to pay off and I’d find the pot of gold—happiness—thought to lie at the end of the high-achievement rainbow. I’d become a hamster on what psychologists call the “hedonic treadmill.” The more you get, the more you want. The more you strive, the more reasons you discover for striving. One

To repeat, all poker starts as a struggle for the ante. This struggle for the antes is what determines all future action. It is a struggle that increases and builds up, but it should never be forgotten that the initial struggle for the antes is what started the war. Players who do forget this, no matter how well they play otherwise, frequently find themselves in trouble. Most often they play too many hands in relation to the size of the ante; sometimes they play too few. The best way to evaluate the size of the ante is to think about it in terms of pot odds and expectation. Let’s say you sit down in an eight-handed $10-$20 game, and everybody antes $1. That creates an $8 pot. Starting with that $8, you should play your hand in terms of the odds you’re getting for each bet in relation to your expectation of winning. If you bet $10, you are laying $10 to win $8. If someone calls you, he is getting $18-to-$10. The fact that $1 or one-eighth of that ante money was originally yours is of no consequence. In truth, it is no longer yours. The moment you place your $1 ante in the pot, it belongs to the pot, not to you, and eventually to the winner of the hand. It is a common fallacy for players to think in terms of the money they have already put in the pot. They make a bad call because they called one or two bets on earlier rounds. However, it is absolutely irrelevant whether you put the money in there or someone else did. It is the total amount, no part of which belongs to you any longer, that should determine how you play your hand. In home games the dealer often antes for everybody. Some players play much more loosely when they are dealing, thinking that the ante is somehow theirs. But to play differently just because you anted, rather than someone else, is absurd. It is the same amount of money out there, no matter from whose stack of chips it came. On the other hand, when you have the blind in hold ’em, for example, you can and should play a little looser, not because that blind is yours, but because you’re getting better pot odds.

We have seen what significance, given socialism, the wealth of human needs acquires, and what significance, therefore, both a new mode of production and a new object of production obtain: a new manifestation of the forces of human nature and a new enrichment of human nature. Under private property their significance is reversed: every person speculates on creating a new need in another, so as to drive him to fresh sacrifice, to place him in a new dependence and to seduce him into a new mode of enjoyment and therefore economic ruin. Each tries to establish over the other an alien power, so as thereby to find satisfaction of his own selfish need. The increase in the quantity of objects is therefore accompanied by an extension of the realm of the alien powers to which man is subjected, and every new product represents a new potentiality of mutual swindling and mutual plundering. Man becomes ever poorer as man, his need for money becomes ever greater if he wants to master the hostile power. The power of his money declines in inverse proportion to the increase in the volume of production: that is, his neediness grows as the power of money increases. The need for money is therefore the true need produced by the economic system, and it is the only need which the latter produces. The quantity of money becomes to an ever greater degree its sole effective quality. Just as it reduces everything to its abstract form, so it reduces itself in the course of its own movement to quantitative being. Excess and intemperance come to be its true norm. Subjectively, this appears partly in the fact that the extension of products and needs becomes a contriving and ever-calculating subservience to inhuman, sophisticated, unnatural and imaginary appetites. Private property does not know how to change crude need into human need. Its idealism is fantasy, caprice and whim; and no eunuch flatters his despot more basely or uses more despicable means to stimulate his dulled capacity for pleasure in order to sneak a favour for himself than does the industrial eunuch – the producer – in order to sneak for himself a few pieces of silver, in order to charm the golden birds, out of the pockets of his dearly beloved neighbours in Christ. He puts himself at the service of the other’s most depraved fancies, plays the pimp between him and his need, excites in him morbid appetites, lies in wait for each of his weaknesses – all so that he can then demand the cash for this service of love. (Every product is a bait with which to seduce away the other’s very being, his money; every real and possible need is a weakness which will lead the fly to the glue-pot. General exploitation of communal human nature, just as every imperfection in man, is a bond with heaven – an avenue giving the priest access to his heart; every need is an opportunity to approach one’s neighbour under the guise of the utmost amiability and to say to him: Dear friend, I give you what you need, but you know the conditio sine qua non; you know the ink in which you have to sign yourself over to me; in providing for your pleasure, I fleece you.) This estrangement manifests itself in part in that the sophistication of needs and of the means (of their satisfaction) on the one side produces a bestial barbarisation, a complete, crude, abstract simplicity of need, on the other; or rather in that it merely reproduces itself in its opposite. Even the need for fresh air ceases to be a need for the worker. Man returns to a cave dwelling, which is now, however, contaminated with the pestilential breath of civilisation, and which he continues to occupy only precariously, it being for him an alien habitation which can be withdrawn from him any day – a place from which, if he does ||XV| not pay, he can be thrown out any day.

Putin discovered that his sources of financing had dried up, even as St. Petersburg’s mafia bosses collected pots of money for Sobchak’s opponents.29 When the votes were counted, Sobchak lost the mayoralty, and Putin lost his job. The consequences were worse for Sobchak, who faced not only the end of his political career but

Becoming a mother if -- and this is a critical if -- you have enough money for help does not mean stripping the membranes and being born anew; it means a series of tiny innumerable tasks added to your life that in the short run mean little but in the long run amount to something. It means coming home from work two hours earlier than you did before because that's when the sitter gets off. It means cooking dinners every night because, after all, you don't have just yourself to feed. It means learning about couscous, high-iron rice, organic spinach, nontoxic pots, thing you never thought of, little addendums to your brain, insignificant in isolation but, collectively, it takes up space. Being a mother means going to the pet store for three hours on Sundays so your girl can see the birds. It means learning and seeing colors anew -- there's purple, there's red, say red, red, red and so you see red as though for the first time, blood in the eye, brightness. Being a mother means knowing the luxuriousness of giving comfort, bringing the slack body up, holding her close; she melts into your form, which is, when all is said and done, still your form. Like so much in life, being a mother is entirely undramatic, filled with small pleasures and multiple inconveniences that only over weeks and months leave marks of any significance. You look back and say, "I know things I did not know before. I love like I did not love before, but how, or when, this happened, is really all a mystery, steps in smoke." Being a mother is a lot like growing up. When, or how, did you become an adult? What was the precise moment you lost your childhood? No one can say. It's all so permeable.

For a continuation bet to be a profitable move, the amount of the bet has to be carefully chosen in comparison to the pot. In essence, you are hoping to buy the pot right now. If you overpay, you'll lose too much money when your opponent calls with a hand better than yours. If you underpay, you'll be offering your opponent correct pot odds to stick around with a drawing hand. Neither situation is good, so the exact amount of the bet is very important.

That night, I regarded myself in the full-length mirror in my London hotel room and marvelled at how my scars have faded and thought about the pots Eddie would sometimes make, then deliberately and carefully break, before resetting them with molten gold (so that he could sell them for much more money). At the time I thought this practice inauthentic and pretentious, but I am starting to look at some things in life in a different way. Kintsukuroi is the name for this ancient Japanese art, which teaches that broken objects are not something to hide away but should be displayed with pride, for they are stronger and more beautiful for surviving the breakage. I think I, too, am stronger and more beautiful for surviving my travails. The

Poker players explained to me that there’s a particular moment at which players are extremely vulnerable to an emotional surge. It’s not when they’ve won a huge pot or when they’ve drawn a fantastic hand. It’s when they’ve just lost a lot of money through bad luck (a ‘bad beat’) or bad strategy. The loss can nudge a player into going ‘on tilt’ – making overly aggressive bets in an effort to win back what he wrongly feels is still his money. The brain refuses to register that the money has gone. Acknowledging the loss and recalculating one’s strategy would be the right thing to do, but that is too painful. Instead, the player makes crazy bets to rectify what he unconsciously believes is a temporary situation. It isn’t the initial loss that does for him, but the stupid plays he makes in an effort to deny that the loss has happened. The eat economic psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky summarised the behaviour in their classic analysis of the psychology of risk: ‘a person who has not made peace with his losses is likely to accept gambles that would be unacceptable to him otherwise’. Even those of us who aren’t professional poker players know how it feels to chase a loss.

Kippering grunted. “Well, being a lawyer is not all that and a pot of porridge. Many times I’ve had to stand and watch justice-call it fair play, in the world of business schemes and contracts-be subverted due to a lying tongue or a bag of dirty money. No matter how highly you begin, such things have a way of chewing your lofty ideals down to the size of rum bottles and any warm female body you can afford, so please don’t begrudge my choice of exquisite brainwash.

Richard had a plan to make some quick money: he could buy pot in El Paso for next to nothing and sell it in Los Angeles for considerably more. Without telling anyone, Richard left El Paso for good on a dirty, battered Greyhound bus. He’d just turned eighteen. Richard listened to heavy metal music over earphones and slept when possible.

Giovanni, in love with her unabashed feminine strength and her reconciliation of love and revolution. I spent nearly every waking moment around Nikki, and I loved her dearly. But sibling relationships are often fraught with petty tortures. I hadn’t wanted to hurt her. But I had. At the time, I couldn’t understand my mother’s anger. I mean this wasn’t really a woman I was punching. This was Nikki. She could take it. Years would pass before I understood how that blow connected to my mom’s past. My mother came to the United States at the age of three. She was born in Lowe River in the tiny parish of Trelawny, Jamaica, hours away from the tourist traps that line the coast. Its swaths of deep brush and arable land made it great for farming but less appealing for honeymoons and hedonism. Lowe River was quiet, and remote, and it was home for my mother, her older brother Ralph, and my grandparents. My maternal great-grandfather Mas Fred, as he was known, would plant a coconut tree at his home in Mount Horeb, a neighboring area, for each of his kids and grandkids when they were born. My mom always bragged that hers was the tallest and strongest of the bunch. The land that Mas Fred and his wife, Miss Ros, tended had been cared for by our ancestors for generations. And it was home for my mom until her parents earned enough money to bring the family to the States to fulfill my grandfather’s dream of a theology degree from an American university. When my mom first landed in the Bronx, she was just a small child, but she was a survivor and learned quickly. She studied the other kids at school like an anthropologist, trying desperately to fit in. She started with the way she spoke. She diligently listened to the radio from the time she was old enough to turn it on and mimicked what she heard. She’d always pull back enough in her interactions with her classmates to give herself room to quietly observe them, so that when she got home she could practice imitating their accents, their idiosyncrasies, their style. Words like irie became cool. Constable became policeman. Easy-nuh became chill out. The melodic, swooping movement of her Jamaican patois was quickly replaced by the more stable cadences of American English. She jumped into the melting pot with both feet. Joy Thomas entered American University in Washington, D.C., in 1968, a year when she and her adopted homeland were both experiencing

For a long time I took a purely theological standpoint on the issue, which is actually so fundamental that it can be used as a springboard for any debate – if environment is the operative factor, for example, if man at the outset is both equal and shapeable and the good man can be shaped by engineering his surroundings, hence my parents’ generation’s belief in the state, the education system and politics, hence their desire to reject everything that had been and hence their new truth, which is not found within man’s inner being, in his detached uniqueness, but on the contrary in areas external to his intrinsic self, in the universal and collective, perhaps expressed in its clearest form by Dag Solstad, who has always been the chronicler of his age, in a text from 1969 containing his famous statement “We won’t give the coffee pot wings”: out with spirituality, out with feeling, in with the new materialism, but it never struck them that the same attitude could lie behind the demolition of old parts of town to make way for roads and parking lots, which naturally the intellectual Left opposed, and perhaps it has not been possible to be aware of this until now when the link between the idea of equality and capitalism, the welfare state and liberalism, Marxist materialism and the consumer society is obvious because the biggest equality creator of all is money, it levels all differences, and if your character and your fate are entities that can be shaped, money is the most natural shaper, and this gives rise to the fascinating phenomena whereby crowds of people assert their individuality and originality by shopping in an identical way while those who ushered all this in with their affirmation of equality, their emphasis on material values and belief in change, are now inveighing against their own handiwork, which they believed the enemy created, but like all simple reasoning this is not wholly true either, life is not a mathematical quantity, it has no theory, only practice, and though it is tempting to understand a generation’s radical rethink of society as being based on its view of the relationship between heredity and environment, this temptation is literary and consists more in the pleasure of speculating, that is, of weaving one’s thoughts through the most disparate areas of human activity, than in the pleasure of proclaiming the truth.

All negotiations, no matter how large or small, are built on a common “currency.” This negotiation currency is known as concessions. To illustrate this, imagine a negotiation as a big pot filled with things that both parties want, sitting between them on the table. The concessions are all the shiny, glittering things inside that pot. In many cases, the most important concession is money (price), but good negotiators realize that the pot is actually filled with many other things as well, depending on the specific nature of the negotiations. As a negotiation progresses, either party may take things out of the pot and give them to the other party (“making a concession”). A party may also put things back in the pot that had previously been taken out. Great negotiators will continually find new things to add to the pot as the negotiation progresses. When both parties agree on how all the stuff in the pot is distributed, a deal has been reached. A skilled negotiator realizes that the more concessions they can add to the pot throughout the negotiation, the more likely it is that both parties will feel like they got a lot out of the negotiation.

(Chris’s per diems were also deployed in a way the filmmakers certainly didn’t expect or intend: it was his weed money, and it enabled him to continue being a regular Harry Pot-head.)

The whole set of stylizations that are known as 'camp' (a word that I was hearing then for the first time) was, in 1926, self-explanatory. Women moved and gesticulated in this way. Homosexuals wished for obvious reasons to copy them. The strange thing about 'camp' is that it has become fossilized. The mannerisms have never changed. If I were now to see a woman sitting with her knees clamped together, one hand on her hip and the other lightly touching her back hair, I should think, 'Either she scored her last social triumph in 1926 or it is a man in drag.' Perhaps 'camp' is set in the 'twenties because after that differences between the sexes—especially visible differences—began to fade. This, of course, has never mattered to women in the least. They know they are women. To homosexuals, who must, with every breath they draw, with every step they take, demonstrate that they are feminine, it is frustrating. They look back in sorrow to that more formal era and try to re-live it. The whole structure of society was at that time much more rigid than it has ever been since, and in two main ways. The first of these was sexual. The short skirts, bobbed hair and flat chests that were in fashion were in fact symbols of immaturity. No one ever drew attention to this, presumably out of politeness. The word 'boyish' was used to describe the girls of that era. This epithet they accepted graciously. They knew that they looked nothing like boys. They also realized that it was meant to be a compliment. Manliness was all the rage. The men of the 'twenties searched themselves for vestiges of effeminacy as though for lice. They did not worry about their characters but about their hair and their clothes. Their predicament was that they must never be caught worrying about either. I once heard a slightly dandified friend of my brother say, 'People are always accusing me of taking care over my appearance.' The sexual meaning of behaviour was only sketchily understood, but the symbolism of clothes was recognized by everyone. To wear suede shoes was to be under suspicion. Anyone who had hair rather than bristle at the back of his neck was thought to be an artist, a foreigner or worse. A friend of mine who was young in the same decade as I says that, when he was introduced to an elderly gentleman as an artist, the gentleman said, 'Oh, I know this young man is an artist. The other day I saw him in the street in a brown jacket.' The other way in which society in the 'twenties was rigid was in its class distinctions. Doubtless to a sociologist there were many different strata merging here and there but, among the people that I was now getting to know, there were only two classes. They never mingled except in bed. There was 'them', who acted refined and spoke nice and whose people had pots of money, and there was 'us', who were the salt of the earth.

Since Shelly Knotek came into his life, Ron’s world was now a black hole of money trouble, legal trouble, and family trouble. And Shelly was right there, stirring the pot, making things worse and worse.

Cadfael refrained from elaborating on the profit FitzHamon expected for his benevolence. It was never worth arguing with Jerome, who in any case knew as well as anyone that the silver lilies and the rent of one farm were no free gift. But Brother Oswald said grievingly: “I wish he had directed his charity better. Surely these are beautiful things, a delight to the eyes, but well sold, they could have provided money enough to buy the means of keeping my poorest petitioners alive through the winter, some of whom will surely die for the want of them.” Brother Jerome was scandalised. “Has he not given them to Our Lady herself?” he lamented indignantly. “Beware of the sin of those apostles who cried out with the same complaint against the woman who brought the pot of spikenard, and poured it over the Saviour’s feet. Remember Our Lord’s reproof to them, that they should let her alone, for she had done well!” “Our Lord was acknowledging a well-meant impulse of devotion,” said Brother Oswald with spirit, “He did not say it was well advised! “She hath done what she could” is what he said. He never said that with a little thought she might not have done better. What use would it have been to wound the giver, after the thing was done? Spilled oil of spikenard could hardly be recovered.