Pouring Concrete Quotes

My life is four walls of missed opportunities poured in concrete molds.

If I run or breathe too deep, the cheap stitches holding me together will snap, and all the stickiness inside will pour out and burn through the concrete.

Men are sandcastles made out of pebbles and the bucket is patriarchy: if you remove it, we fear we won’t be able to hold ourselves together, we pour in cement to fill the gaps to make ourselves concrete constructions.

Cities are more than the sum of their infrastructure. They transcend brick and mortar, concrete and steel. They're the vessels into which human knowledge is poured.

A ten-day old baby, whose only experience of life is being take way from their mother, loaded into a truck and driven to a slaughterhouse, is left in the cold overnight on a concrete floor before their throat is cut, all so we can pour their mother's milk over our cornflakes.

This isn't a weapon cache-search mission during which we kick down doors looking for suspects. We pour concrete lands where IED exploded to keep insurgents from planting more. No news reporters followed us around, because soldiers saving lives aren't as interesting as soldiers taking lives.

At last my liaison pulled up before a squat structure of poured concrete buttressed with steel, bleak and featureless, like a sepulcher for people who didn't believe in an afterlife.

And the plunder was not just of Prince alone. Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuitions for Montessori and music lessons. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League. Think of all the time spent regulating sleepovers. Think of the surprise birthday parties, the daycare, and the reference checks on babysitters. Think of World Book and Childcraft. Think of checks written for family photos. Think of credit cards charged for vacations. Think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry sets, racetracks, and model trains. Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth.

Nothing is set in concrete the way it typically is when one is, for example, pouring concrete.

We are laying the foundation for some new, monstrous civilization. Only now do I realize what price was paid for building the ancient civilizations. The Egyptian pyramids, the temples and Greek statues—what a hideous crime they were! How much blood must have poured on to the Roman roads, the bulwarks, and the city walls. Antiquity—the tremendous concentration camp where the slave was branded on the forehead by his master, and crucified for trying to escape! Antiquity—the conspiracy of the free men against the slaves! .... If the Germans win the war, what will the world know about us? They will erect huge buildings, highways, factories, soaring monuments. Our hands will be placed under every brick, and our backs will carry the steel rails and the slabs of concrete. They will kill off our families, our sick, our aged. They will murder our children. And we shall be forgotten, drowned out by the voices of the poets, the jurists, the philosophers, the priests. They will produce their own beauty, virtue, and truth. They will produce religion.

He trusts Malcolm, but Malcolm doesn’t want trust: he wants someone to show the silvery, stripey marble he’s found from a small quarry outside Izmir and argue about how much of it is too much; and to make smell the cypress from Gifu that he’s sourced for the bathroom tub; and to examine the objects—hammers; wrenches; pliers—he’s embedded like trilobites in the poured concrete floors.

I'm building my ducks a new pen, and I'm pouring concrete myself. But I did have some cement sent off to the lab for genetic ancestry testing, to see if this foundation is related to Jimmy Hoffa.

Nos cancers ne sont que le résultat concret des maux de nos âmes. Ce qu'on refoule, ce qu'on nie. Tout s'entasse. Détourner les yeux de ce qui nous dérange ne le fait pas disparaître pour autant, au contraire, il ne le fait que pourrir davantage dans son coin. Et un jour il se répand, déborde, et nous retombe dessus.

Libraries, museums, universities, everything we designed and built over six thousand years. Cities are more than the sum of their infrastructure. They transcend brick and mortar, concrete and steel. They're the vessels into which human knowledge is poured.

Avery poured a cup of coffee hot and compared it to a political debate—hot enough to boil an egg and filled with artificial flavor.

It crawled into your lungs like poured concrete, then sat there leaking poisonous chemicals into your blood.

Be careful what you say. It comes true. It comes true. I had to leave home in order to see the world logically, logic the new way of seeing. I learned to think that mysteries are for explanation. I enjoy the simplicity. Concrete pours out of my mouth to cover the forests with freeways and sidewalks. Give me plastics, periodical tables, TV dinners with vegetables no more complex than peas mixed with diced carrots. Shine floodlights into dark corners: no ghosts.

I crossed my arms, stilled by a revelation that had been mounting in me ever since our arrival in this bower of poured concrete: that as the “subject,” I was both the center of attention and completely extraneous. The feeling brought with it an eerie, stultifying familiarity; I was still the model, after all. I was modeling my life.

Je choisis des mots simples et concrets... J'essaie de faire des phrases courtes et j'évite les inversions autant que possible. Je ne mets pas un mot très bref à côté d'un mot de plusieurs syllables... Si un mot finit par une consonne, je lui trouve un compagnon qui commence par une voyelle. Et je lis mon texte à voix haute pour entendre comment ça sonne.

Every generation of children instinctively nests itself in nature, no matter matter how tiny a scrap of it they can grasp. In a tale of one city child, the poet Audre Lord remembers picking tufts of grass which crept up through the paving stones in New York City and giving them as bouquets to her mother. It is a tale of two necessities. The grass must grow, no matter the concrete suppressing it. The child must find her way to the green, no matter the edifice which would crush it. "The Maori word for placenta is the same word for land, so at birth the placenta is buried, put back in the mothering earth. A Hindu baby may receive the sun-showing rite surya-darsana when, with conch shells ringing to the skies, the child is introduced to the sun. A newborn child of the Tonga people 'meets' the moon, dipped in the ocean of Kosi Bay in KwaZulu-Natal. Among some of the tribes of India, the qualities of different aspects of nature are invoked to bless the child, so he or she may have the characteristics of earth, sky and wind, of birds and animals, right down to the earthworm. Nothing is unbelonging to the child. "'My oldest memories have the flavor of earth,' wrote Frederico García Lorca. In the traditions of the Australian deserts, even from its time in the womb, the baby is catscradled in kinship with the world. Born into a sandy hollow, it is cleaned with sand and 'smoked' by fire, and everything -- insects, birds, plants, and animals -- is named to the child, who is told not only what everything is called but also the relationship between the child and each creature. Story and song weave the child into the subtle world of the Dreaming, the nested knowledge of how the child belongs. "The threads which tie the child to the land include its conception site and the significant places of the Dreaming inherited through its parents. Introduced to creatures and land features as to relations, the child is folded into the land, wrapped into country, and the stories press on the child's mind like the making of felt -- soft and often -- storytelling until the feeling of the story of the country is impressed into the landscape of the child's mind. "That the juggernaut of ants belongs to a child, belligerently following its own trail. That the twitch of an animal's tail is part of a child's own tale or storyline, once and now again. That on the papery bark of a tree may be written the songline of a child's name. That the prickles of a thornbush may have dynamic relevance to conscience. That a damp hollow by the riverbank is not an occasional place to visit but a permanent part of who you are. This is the beginning of belonging, the beginning of love. "In the art and myth of Indigenous Australia, the Ancestors seeded the country with its children, so the shimmering, pouring, circling, wheeling, spinning land is lit up with them, cartwheeling into life.... "The human heart's love for nature cannot ultimately be concreted over. Like Audre Lord's tufts of grass, will crack apart paving stones to grasp the sun. Children know they are made of the same stuff as the grass, as Walt Whitman describes nature creating the child who becomes what he sees: There was a child went forth every day And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became... The early lilacs became part of this child... And the song of the phoebe-bird... In Australia, people may talk of the child's conception site as the origin of their selfhood and their picture of themselves. As Whitman wrote of the child becoming aspects of the land, so in Northern Queensland a Kunjen elder describes the conception site as 'the home place for your image.' Land can make someone who they are, giving them fragments of themselves.

Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuitions for Montessori and music lessons. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League. Think of the time spent regulating sleepovers. Think of the surprise birthday parties, the daycare, and the reference checks on babysitters. Think of World Book and Childcraft. Think of checks written for family photos. Think of credit cards charged for vacations. Think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry sets, racetracks, and model trains. Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth. Think of your mother, who had no father. And your grandmother, who was abandoned by her father. And your grandfather, who was left behind by his father. And think of how Prince's daughter was now drafted into those solemn ranks and deprived of her birthright — that vessel which was her father, which brimmed with twenty-five years of love and was the investment of her grandparents and was to be her legacy.

It's one reason I love traveling so much." I hesitate, searching for how to pour this long-steeping soupy thought into concrete words. "As a kid, I was a loner," I explain, "and I always figured that when I grew up, I'd leave my hometown and discover other people like me somewhere else. Which I have, you know? But everyone gets lonely sometimes, and whenever that happens, I buy a plane ticket and go to the airport and- I don't know. I don't feel lonely anymore. Because no matter what makes all those people different, they're all just trying to get somewhere, waiting to reach someone.

On May 10th, the temperature and radioactive emissions from inside the reactor started to fall. By the 11th, days after the water finished draining, a team of technicians ventured into the sub-levels of the plant, bored a hole through a wall below the core and poked a radiometer through. It confirmed their worst fears: the molten core had cracked the reactor’s concrete foundations and at least partially poured into the basement. There was now next to nothing stopping it from breaking through the foundations of the building itself and reaching the water table below. A better and more permanent solution than injecting liquid nitrogen from the surface was required.

Ce qui importe avant tout, c'est que le sens gouverne le choix des mots, et non l'inverse. En matière de prose, la pire des choses que l'on puisse faire avec les mots est de s'abandonner à eux. Quand vous pensez à un objet concret, vous n'avez pas besoin de mots, et si vous voulez décrire ce que vous venez de visualiser, vous vous mettrez sans doute alors en quête des termes qui vous paraîtront les plus adéquats. Quand vous pensez à une notion abstraite, vous êtes plus enclin à recourir d'emblée aux mots, si bien qu'à moins d'un effort conscient pour éviter ce travers, le jargon existant s'impose à vous et fait le travail à votre place, au risque de brouiller ou même d'altérer le sens de votre réflexion. Sans doute vaut-il mieux s'abstenir, dans la mesure du possible, de recourir aux termes abstraits et et essayer de s'exprimer clairement par le biais de l'image ou de la sensation. On pourra ensuite choisir - et non pas simplement "accepter" - les formulations qui serreront au plus près la pensée, puis changer de point de vue et voir quelle impression elles pourraient produire sur d'autres personnes. Ce dernier effort mental élimine toutes les images rebattues ou incohérentes, toutes les expressions préfabriquées, les répétitions inutiles et, de manière générale, le flou et la poudre aux yeux. Extrait de "La politique et la langue anglaise

They made a sweeping turn into Park Avenue and Herzog clutched the broken window handle. It wouldn’t open. But if it opened dust would pour in. They were demolishing and raising buildings. The avenue was filled with concrete-mixing trucks, smells of wet sand and powdery gray [sic] cement. Crashing, stamping pile-driving below, and, higher, structural steel, interminably and hungrily going up into the cooler, more delicate blue. Orange beams hung from the cranes like straws. But down in the street where the buses were spurting the poisonous exhaust of cheap fuel, and the cars were crammed together, it was stifling, grinding, the racket of machinery and the desperately purposeful crowds - horrible!

On the screen luminous tremors appeared. Lila began to type on the keyboard, I was speechless. It was in no way comparable to a typewriter, even an electric one. With her fingertips she caressed gray keys, and the writing appeared silently on the screen, green like newly sprouted grass. What was in her head, attached to who knows what cortex of the brain, seemed to pour out miraculously and fix itself on the void of the screen. It was power that, although passing for act, remained power, an electrochemical stimulus that was instantly transformed into light. It seemed to me like the writing of God as it must have been on Sinai at the time of the Commandments, impalpable and tremendous, but with a concrete effect of purity. Magnificent, I said. I'll teach you, she said. And she taught me, and dazzling, hypnotic segments began to lengthen, sentences that I said, sentences that she said, our volatile discussions were imprinted on the dark well of the screen like wakes without foam.

A visible cloud of steam rose from a long wide pipe protruding from the roof of a large concrete factory-like building nearby, and the air all around was filled with the intensely savory scent of barbecue potato chips, a flavor being manufactured in quantity for one of Southern's vendors. Grace knew that the barbecue scent came from a massive vat of liquefied compounds, which could be cooled and then poured into hundreds of fifty-five-gallon drums in the morning, carefully sealed, loaded onto tractor-trailers, and shipped out, to be warehoused for as long as two years and then, eventually, utilized in the industrial production of billions of pounds of highly processed potato-based snack foods. She knew what she smelled was a by-product from the manufacture of a highly concentrated chemical. Nevertheless, the scent evoked picnics in the park, bag lunches in elementary school lunchrooms shared over laughter with her dearest friends, long-buried feelings from childhood that rose from her heart.

The Sarcophagus needed the strength to withstand Ukrainian weather for an estimated 20 years - time to develop a more permanent solution - and contain the astronomical levels of radiation within. Erecting the enclosure involved a quarter of a million workers, all of whom reached their lifetime maximum dose. In order for the Sarcophagus to be built, the radioactive graphite and reactor fuel first had to be cleared up and buried, so remote control bulldozers were brought in from West Germany, Japan and Russia to dig up the earth. Workers had originally piled up rubble at the base of Unit 4 and poured concrete straight onto it, intending to seal in the radiation, but that didn’t last long. “Geysers are starting to shoot up from the wet concrete. When the liquid falls on the fuel in the pile, there is an atomic excursion or simply a disruption of heat exchange and a rise in temperature. The radiation situation deteriorates sharply”, reported Vasiliy Kizima, chief of the construction project at the time.229

On that fateful morning in April 1986, the explosion that blew off the reactor lid also dislodged special serpentine sand and concrete from within the thick walls surrounding the RBMK. In that same moment, a powerful shock wave forced the entire bottom half of the core assembly - including the lower biological shield - downward by several meters, into the space below. Over the following week, intense heat from the fire and radioactive decay increased until it reached temperatures sufficient to melt the fuel assembly, which poured out and bonded with the sand/concrete mix to form a kind of radioactive lava called corium. This lava then oozed through pipes, ducts and cracks in the damaged structure to the rooms beneath. The Elephant’s Foot was one offshoot of this lava, which had cooled into a glassy form. Melted fuel vacating the exposed reactor like this is probably what caused the sudden drop in temperature and emission levels in early May, 1986. A molten core is capable of burning through 30cm of concrete within hours, hence the scramble to prevent this from happening.246

Live water heals memories. I look up the creek and here it comes, the future, being borne aloft as on a winding succession of laden trays. You may wake and look from the window and breathe the real air, and say, with satisfaction or longing, “This is it.” But if you look up the creek, if you look up the creek in any weather, your spirit fills, and you are saying, with an exulting rise of the lungs, “Here it comes!” Here it comes. In the far distance I can see the concrete bridge where the road crosses the creek. Under the bridge and beyond it the water is flat and silent, blued by distance and stilled by depth. It is so much sky, a fallen shred caught in the cleft of banks. But it pours. The channel here is straight as an arrow; grace is itself an archer. Between the dangling wands of bankside willows, and Osage orange, I see the creek pour down. It spills toward me streaming over a series of sandstone tiers, down and down, and down. I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball.

And it occurred to me then that you would not escape, that there were awful men who’d laid plans for you, and I could not stop them. Prince Jones was the superlative of all my fears.And if he, good Christian, scion of a striving class, patron saint of the twice as good, could be forever bound, who then could not? And the plunder was not just of Prince alone. Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuitions for Montessori and music lessons. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League. Think of the time spent regulating sleepovers. Think of the surprise birthday parties, the daycare, and the reference checks on babysitters. Think of World Book and Childcraft. Think of checks written for family photos. Think of credit cards charged for vacations. Think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry sets, racetracks, and model trains. Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth.

a brief history of art Cave paintings. Clay then bronze statues. Then for about 1,400 years, people painted nothing except bold but rudimentary pictures of either the Virgin Mary and Child or the Crucifixion. Some bright spark realised that things in the distance looked smaller and the pictures of the Virgin Mary and the Crucifixion improved hugely. Suddenly everyone was good at hands and facial expression and now the statues were in marble. Fat cherubs started appearing, while elsewhere there was a craze for domestic interiors and women standing by windows doing needlework. Dead pheasants and bunches of grapes and lots of detail. Cherubs disappeared and instead there were fanciful, idealised landscapes, then portraits of aristocrats on horseback, then huge canvasses of battles and shipwrecks. Then it was back to women lying on sofas or getting out of the bath, murkier this time, less detailed then a great many wine bottles and apples, then ballet dancers. Paintings developed a certain splodginess - critical term - so that they barely resembled what they were meant to be. Someone signed a urinal, and it all went mad. Neat squares of primary colour were followed by great blocks of emulsion, then soup cans, then someone picked up a video camera, someone else poured concrete, and the whole thing became hopelessly fractured into a kind of confusing, anything-goes free for all.

Hear that? Living skulls! What are we doing here? What war at Troy? Does anyone care? Gods of love and hate! Aren't they the same god? All of us, all our lives, searching for the one perfect enemy- you, me, Helen, Paris, Menelaos, all those crazy Greeks! all those hapless Trojans! my dear beloved Jack! Jack and I fought all the time. I remember almost nothing but the fights - every fight a war to end all wars, you know how it goes, a righteous war, a final war, the worst fight you've ever had, you can't do this again, this time you'll get things straight one way or the other or it's over, he'll see what you mean, see you're right, fights aren't about anything except being right, are they? once and for all. You feel old. Wrong. Clumsy. You sit in two chairs on the porch. Or the kitchen. Or the front hall. Hell arrives. It's as if the war was already there, waiting, the two of you poured into it like wet concrete. The chairs you sit in are the wrong chairs, they're the chairs you never sit in because they're so uncomfortable, you keep thinking you should move but you don't, your neck hurts, you hate your neck, evening closes in. Birds move about the yard. Hell yawns. War pours out of both of you, steaming and stinking. You rush backward from it and become children, every still sentence slamming you back into the child you still are, every sentence not what you meant to say at all but the meaning keeps flaring and contracting, as sparks drop on gasoline, Fuckshit this! Fuckshit that! no reason to live. You're getting vertigo. He's being despicable. Your mother was like this. Stop whimpering. No use asking, What is this about? Don't leave the room. I have to leave the room. Breathless, blaming, I'm not blaming! How is this not blaming! Hours pass or do they. You say the same things or are they different things? Hell smells stale. Fights aren't about anything, fights are about themselves. You're stiff. You hate these chairs. Nothing is resolved. It is too dark to see. You both go to bed and doze slightly, touching slightly. In the night a nightmare. Some giant bird, or insect, some flapping thing, trying to settle on the back of your neck, you can't see what it is or get it off. Pure fear. Scream unearthly. He jerks you awake. Oh sweetie, he says. He is using his inside voice, his most inside voice. The distance between that voice and the fight voice measures your whole world. How can a voice change so. You are saved. He has saved you. He sees you saved. An easement occurs, as night dew on leaves. And yet (you think suddenly) you yourself do not possess sort of inside voice - no wonder he's lonely. You this cannot offer this refuge, cannot save him, not ever, and, although physiological in origin, or genetic, or who knows, you understand the lack is felt by him as a turning away. No one can heal this. You both decide without words to just - skip it. You grip one another. In the night, in the silence, the grip slowly loosens and silence washes you out somewhere onto a shore of sleep. Morning arrives. Troy is still there. You hear from below the clatter of everyone putting on their armour. You go to the window.

In scale and audacity, the dam was astonishing; engineers were going to anchor a mile-long wall of concrete in bedrock at the bottom of a steep canyon in the Columbia. They would excavate 45 million cubic yards of dirt and rock, and pour 24 million tons of concrete. Among the few dams in the Northwest not built by the Corps of Engineers, the Grand Coulee was the work of the Bureau of Reclamation. When completed, it was a mile across at the top, forty-six stories high, and heralded as the biggest thing ever built by man. The dam backed up the river for 151 miles, creating a lake with 600 miles of shoreline. At the dam’s dedication in 1941, Roosevelt said Grand Coulee would open the world to people who had been beat up by the elements, abused by the rich and plagued by poor luck. But a few months after it opened, Grand Coulee became the instrument of war. Suddenly, the country needed to build sixty thousand planes a year, made of aluminum, smelted by power from Columbia River water, and it needed to build ships—big ones—from the same power source. Near the end of the war, America needed to build an atomic bomb, whose plutonium was manufactured on the banks of the Columbia. Power from the Grand Coulee was used to break uranium into radioactive subelements to produce that plutonium. By war’s end, only a handful of farms were drawing water from the Columbia’s greatest dam. True, toasters in desert homes were warming bread with Grand Coulee juice, and Washington had the cheapest electrical rates of any state in the country, but most of that power for the people was being used by Reynolds Aluminum in Longview and Alcoa in Vancouver and Kaiser Aluminum in Spokane and Tacoma.

If you are going to build the Empire State Building, the first thing you need to do is dig a deep hole and pour a strong foundation. If you are going to build a home in the suburbs, all you need to do is pour a 6-inch slab of concrete. Most people, in their drive to get rich, are trying to build an Empire State Building on a 6-inch slab.

The greatest of these Hadrianic survivals is undoubtedly the Pantheon. A former temple, inscribed to Marcus Agrippa (the original dedicatee of the first Pantheon to be erected on this spot, which was one of two destroyed by fire), the Pantheon probably survived the demolition which was the lot of many pagan buildings at the hands of the popes because of its early re-use as a church. Built between 118 and 125 CE, it became the Church of St Mary and the Martyrs in the seventh century and is still a Christian basilica today. Inside are two great glories of ancient architecture. The vaulted roof, made of concrete poured into wooden moulds, was the greatest span of such roof ever known

Nul ne songerait à se plaindre de l’adoucissement des mœurs, mais il convient néanmoins de le considérer, non pas isolément, mais dans son contexte, car celui-ci en révèle l’intention, la portée et la valeur. En réalité, l’adoucissement des mœurs - dans la mesure où il n’est pas illusoire - ne peut être une supériorité intrinsèque qu’à deux conditions, à savoir, premièrement, qu’il soit un avantage concret pour la société, et deuxièmement, que son prix ne soit pas ce qui donne un sens à la vie ; le respect de la personne humaine ne doit pas ouvrir la porte à la dictature de l’erreur et de la bassesse, à l’écrasement de la qualité par la quantité, à la corruption générale et à la perte des valeurs culturelles, sans quoi il n’est, par rapport aux tyrannies antiques, que l’excès contraire et non la norme. Quand l’humanitarisme n’est plus que l’expression d’une surestimation de l’humain aux dépens du divin, ou du fait brut aux dépens de la vérité, il ne saurait avoir la valeur d’une acquisition positive ; il est facile de critiquer le « fanatisme » de nos ancêtres quand on n’a même plus la notion d’une vérité salvatrice, ou d’être « tolérant » quand on se moque de la religion.

MT: These texts are at one and the same time very beautiful and obscure; they need to be explicated, clarified. “What is hidden will be revealed.” Why must Revelation be hidden? RG: It's not that it must be hidden, actually it's not hidden at all. It's mankind that is blind. We're inside the closure of representation, everyone is in the fishbowl of his or her culture. In other words, mankind doesn't see what I was saying earlier, the principle of illusion that governs our viewpoint. Even after the Revelation, we still don't understand. MT: Does that mean that things are going to emerge gradually, but that at first they're incomprehensible? RG: They seem incomprehensible because mankind lives under the sign of Satan, lives a lie and lives in fear of the lie, in fear of liars. The reversal performed by the Passion has yet to occur. MT: Insofar as the Church itself has been mistaken for two thousand years and has been practicing a sacrificial reading of the Passion of the Christ, that reading is a way of hiding Revelation. RG: I'm not saying that the Church is mistaken. The reading that I'm proposing is in line with all the great dogmas, but it endows them with an anthropological underpinning that had gone unnoticed. MT: Why not just clean up our bad habits by sweeping them away once and for all in the year zero, making way for an era of love and infinite peace? RG: Because the world wouldn't have been able to take it! Since the sacrificial principle is the fundamental principle of the human order—up to a certain point human beings need to pour out their violence and tensions onto scapegoats—destroying it all at once is impossible. That's why Christianity is made in such a way as to allow for transitions. This is no doubt one of the reasons why it is at once so far from and so close to myth, and always susceptible to being interpreted a bit mythically. When Nietzsche says that Christianity is impossible, that it can only lead to absurdities, to outrageous, insane things, it can be said that he's superficially right, even if ultimately he's wrong. You can't get rid of the sacrificial principle by just flicking it away as if it were a piece of dust. History isn't finished. Every day very interesting things, changes in outlook, are happening right before our eyes. In the United States and everywhere, a lot of current cultural phenomena can be unified by describing them as the discovery of new victims, or rather as their concrete rehabilitation, for in truth we've known about them for a long time: women, children, the elderly, the insane, the physically and mentally handicapped, and so forth. For example, the question of abortion, which has great importance in American debates, is no longer formulated except in the following terms: “Who is the real victim? Is it the child or is it the mother?” You can no longer defend a given position, or indeed any of them, except by making it into a contribution to the anti-victimary crusade. MT

why do people pour water on concrete expecting something to grow from it" AP

The dominance of football in Texas high schools had become the focus of raging debate all over the state in 1983. The governor of Texas, Mark White, appointed Perot to head a committee on educational reform. In pointing to school systems he thought were skewed in favor of extracurricular activities, Perot took particular aim at Odessa. On ABC’s Nightline, he called Permian fans “football crazy,” and during the show it was pointed out that a $5.6 million high school football stadium had been built in Odessa in 1982. The stadium included a sunken artificial-surface field eighteen feet below ground level, a two-story press box with VIP seating for school board members and other dignitaries, poured concrete seating for 19,032, and a full-time caretaker who lived in a house on the premises. “He made it look like we were a bunch of West Texas hicks, fanatics,” said Allen of Perot. The stadium “was something the community took a lot of pride in and he went on television and said you’re a bunch of idiots for building it.” Most of the money for the stadium had come from a voter-approved bond issue.

the thought of putting myself out there makes my body suddenly seize up, my chest feeling heavy and suffocating, like it’s filling with poured concrete.

Un jour, au debut des annees soixante-dix, pendant l'occupation russe du pays, tous les deux chasses de nos emplois, tous les deux en mauvaise sante, ma femme et moi sommes alles voir, dans un hopital de la banlieue de Prague, un grand medicin, ami de tous les opposants, un vieux sage juif, comme nous l'appelions, le professeur Smahel. Nous y avons rencontre E., un journaliste, lui aussi chasse de partout, lui aussi en mauvaise sante, et tous les quatre nous sommes restes longtemps a bavarder, heureux de l'atmosphere de sympathie mutuelle. Pour le retour, E. nous a pris dans sa voiture et s'est mis a parler de Bohumil Hrabal, alors le plus grand ecrivain tcheque vivant; d'une fantaisie sans bornes, feru d'experiences plebeiennes (ses romans sont peuples des gens les plus ordinaires), il etait tres lu et tres aime (toute la vague de la jeune cinematographie tcheque l'a adore comme son saint patron). Il etait profondement apolitique. Ce qui, dans un regime pour lequel 'tout etait politique', n'etait pas innocent: son apolitisme se moquait du monde ou sevissaient les ideologies. C'est pour cela qu'il s'est trouve pendant longtemps dans une relative disgrace (inutilisable qu'il etait pour tous les engagements officiels), mais c'est pour ce meme apolitisme (il ne s'est jamais engage contre le regime non plus) que, pendant l'occupation russe, on l'a laisse en paix et qu'il a pu, comme ci, comme ca, publier quelques livres. E. l'injuriait avec fureur: Comment peut-il accepter qu'on edite ses livres tandis que ses collegues sont interdits de publication? Comment peut-il cautionner ainsi le regime? Sans un seul mot de protestation? Son comportement est detestable et Hrabal est un collabo. J'ai reagi avec le meme fureur: Quelle absurdite de parler de collaboration si l'esprit des livres de Hrabal, leur humour, leur imagination sont le contraire meme de la mentalite qui nous gouverne et veut nous etouffer dans sa camisole de force? Le monde ou l'on peut lire Hrabal est tout a fait different de celui ou sa voix ne serait pas audible. Un seul livre de Hrabal rend un plus grand service aux gens, a leur liberte d'esprit, que nous tous avec nos gestes et nos proclamations protestataires! La discussion dans la voiture s'est vite transformee en querrelle haineuse. En y repensant plus tard, etonne par cette haine (authentique et parfaitement reciproque), je me suis dit: notre entente chez le medicin etait passagere, due aux circonstances historiques particulieres qui faisaient de nous des persecutes; notre desaccord, en revanche, etait fondamental et independant des circonstances; c'etait le desaccord entre ceux pour qui la lutte politique est superieure a la vie concrete, a l'art, a la pensee, et ceux pour qui le sens de la politique est d'etre au service de la vie concrete, de l'art, de la pensee. Ces deux attitudes sont, peut-etre, l'une et l'autre legitimes, mais l'une avec l'autre irreconciliables.

Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuitions for Montessori and music lessons. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League. Think of the time spent regulating sleepovers. Think of the surprise birthday parties, the daycare, and the reference checks on babysitters. Think of World Book and Childcraft. Think of checks written for family photos. Think of credit cards charged for vacations. Think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry sets, racetracks, and model trains. Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth.

And if he, good Christian, scion of a striving class, patron saint of the twice as good, could be forever bound, who then could not? And the plunder was not just of Prince alone. Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuitions for Montessori and music lessons. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League. Think of the time spent regulating sleepovers. Think of the surprise birthday parties, the daycare, and the reference checks on babysitters. Think of World Book and Childcraft. Think of checks written for family photos. Think of credit cards charged for vacations. Think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry sets, racetracks, and model trains. Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth. Think of your mother, who had no father. And your grandmother, who was abandoned by her father. And your grandfather, who was left behind by his father. And think of how Prince’s daughter was now drafted into those solemn ranks and deprived of her birthright—that vessel which was her father, which brimmed with twenty-five years of love and was the investment of her grandparents and was to be her legacy.

Also shipped to the Norman coast were ten miles of floating piers and pierheads, with telescoping legs to rise and subside with the tide. In all, two million tons of construction materials went into the Mulberries, including seventeen times more concrete than had been poured for Yankee Stadium in the 1920s.

Progressives still express their worries in an essentially 1930s vocabulary of distributive justice, understood in economic, meaning material, terms. This assumes a reassuringly mundane politics of splittable differences—how much concrete to pour, how many crops to subsidize by how much, which factions shall get what.

L’absence de sens du ridicule, d’abord. Un intellectuel engage n’est pas pour moi, je pense que vous l’avez senti, quelqu’un de ridicule. Je visualise, j’imagine les sourires en coin, tout ce que vous voudrez, mais je ne ressens pas, au fond de moi, un intellectuel engage comme quelqu’un de ridicule; parce que je ne ressens, au fond de moi, que tres peu de choses comme ridicules. Je me suis sans doute trop eloigne de toute appartenance sociale concrete – et sans doute, par la meme occasion, un peu de l’humanite (mais n’anticipons pas), pour que soit vraiment present en moi le sens du ridicule.

La part dévolue à Génio Staglioffa dans la régence de hommes, ceux de son propre pays, faisait partie d'un plan supérieur et invisible. La réussite de ce plan se trouvait exiger le bonheur, le pouvoir et le succès de Génio Staglioffa. Mais cela ne parvenait pas à le calmer tout à fait. Briller, non seulement dans l'éloquence mais dans la politique a son degré concret, fécond, aménager au jour le jour la vitalité publique, modeler l'industrie lombarde, immeubles de trente étages pour la périphérie, réseaux de routes, ces inimitables journaux, ces orphelinats, ces laboratoires, les automobilistes invités à modérer leur klaxon bestial, le dégoût de l'immonde cigarette enfin communiqué aux citoyens, les mots étrangers éliminés de la langue nationale, fallait-il en tirer tant de gloire? Tant de fois, Tant de fois des hommes de valeur et de commandement avaient bâti et rebâti leur empire, leur peuple, leur cité! Ils étaient morts.

leaned over and whispered to Aiden, “How long do you think he’s been in there?” Aiden answered without giving it much thought. “It’s difficult to tell.  Based on the rot and decomposition along the jaw line, I’d say maybe a few months.  But don’t quote me on that.” I looked hard at the torn skin and exposed bone.  There was no way Aiden was right.  This one had been in there much longer than a couple of months.  In fact, it wouldn’t have surprised me if our tour guide let us know that this particular zombie was the first zombie to ever be held in captivity and put on display. Looking along the edge of the guard rail that separated us from the ‘State of the Art’ Zombie display at the zoo, I couldn’t help but think that there wasn’t a whole lot separating us from the flesh eating lot.  And that if they somehow managed to get out of the ten foot deep pit they were in, it would be utter terror and devastation for the rest of us.   The part that was most frightening was that the pit was completely open on the top. No barrier at all. None. I raised my hand and asked the tour guide, “How do you know we’re safe?” He took a second, startled that anybody would even dare ask such a question.  He hoisted his belt buckle above his overly extended belly and gave the lapels of his coat a quick jerk before answering.   “Son, this here display was designed completely with safety in mind.  The pit has been measured precisely and this guard rail is completely reinforced with the strongest steel mesh imaginable.  Not to mention the concrete barrier has been poured to triple the required thickness.” He gave a quick snort and nervously touched his hand to his name tag, giving it a quick downward tug before finishing his response.  “So you see, it’s quite safe.” Everyone nodded, showing their approval at the guide’s explanation.   But not me.   I looked over the edge of the enclosure, staring at the collection of zombies that were gathered below.  They looked up at me, making eye contact with their cold, blue eyes.   There must’ve been ten or fifteen of them.  One of them jumped up, attempting to climb out of the pit, its finger tips just missing the top of the super thick concrete wall. I felt a chill go up my spine.  The thought of one of them managing to get loose gave me a quick shudder as we moved on with the tour, in the direction of the lions.   “Are you okay?” Aiden asked, sunflower seeds sticking to his lips as he attempted to spit them out on the ground.  He spat and sputtered for a few seconds before he realized I was looking at him.  “What?”  He asked. “I’m fine.” “You are a lot of things Darren.  But fine is not one of them.” He was right.  I hated it when he was right. “Alright, you got me.  I’m a little nervous, that’s all.

An architect is a person who plans, designs, and reviews the construction of buildings. Their finished product is hard to change as it is, literally, poured in concrete. Software changes all the time, even many years after installation, so it is surprising just how much architect Christopher Alexander’s 1977 book A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction has influenced the software industry. Alexander’s book is about the timeless way of building.

The Primary Act. As they entered the cinema, Dr Nathan confided to Captain Webster, ‘Talbert has accepted in absolute terms the logic of the sexual union. For him all junctions, whether of our own soft biologies or the hard geometries of these walls and ceilings, are equivalent to one another. What Talbert is searching for is the primary act of intercourse, the first apposition of the dimensions of time and space. In the multiplied body of the film actress - one of the few valid landscapes of our age - he finds what seems to be a neutral ground. For the most part the phenomenology of the world is a nightmarish excrescence. Our bodies, for example, are for him monstrous extensions of puffy tissue he can barely tolerate. The inventory of the young woman is in reality a death kit.’ Webster watched the images of the young woman on the screen, sections of her body intercut with pieces of modern architecture. All these buildings. What did Talbert want to do - sodomize the Festival Hall? Pressure Points. Koester ran towards the road as the helicopter roared overhead, its fans churning up a storm of pine needles and cigarette cartons. He shouted at Catherine Austin, who was squatting on the nylon blanket, steering her body stocking around her waist. Two hundred yards beyond the pines was the perimeter fence. She followed Koester along the verge, the pressure of his hands and loins still marking her body. These zones formed an inventory as sterile as the items in Talbert’s kit. With a smile she watched Koester trip clumsily over a discarded tyre. This unattractive and obsessed young man - why had she made love to him? Perhaps, like Koester, she was merely a vector in Talbert’s dreams. Central Casting. Dr Nathan edged unsteadily along the catwalk, waiting until Webster had reached the next section. He looked down at the huge geometric structure that occupied the central lot of the studio, now serving as the labyrinth in an elegant film version of The Minotaur . In a sequel to Faustus and The Shrew , the film actress and her husband would play Ariadne and Theseus. In a remarkable way the structure resembled her body, an exact formalization of each curve and cleavage. Indeed, the technicians had already christened it ‘Elizabeth’. He steadied himself on the wooden rail as the helicopter appeared above the pines and sped towards them. So the Daedalus in this neural drama had at last arrived. An Unpleasant Orifice. Shielding his eyes, Webster pushed through the camera crew. He stared up at the young woman standing on the roof of the maze, helplessly trying to hide her naked body behind her slim hands. Eyeing her pleasantly, Webster debated whether to climb on to the structure, but the chances of breaking a leg and falling into some unpleasant orifice seemed too great. He stood back as a bearded young man with a tight mouth and eyes ran forwards. Meanwhile Talbert strolled in the centre of the maze, oblivious of the crowd below, calmly waiting to see if the young woman could break the code of this immense body. All too clearly there had been a serious piece of miscasting. ‘Alternate’ Death. The helicopter was burning briskly. As the fuel tank exploded, Dr Nathan stumbled across the cables. The aircraft had fallen on to the edge of the maze, crushing one of the cameras. A cascade of foam poured over the heads of the retreating technicians, boiling on the hot concrete around the helicopter. The body of the young woman lay beside the controls like a figure in a tableau sculpture, the foam forming a white fleece around her naked shoulders.

Plan for Success is a staple of management philosophy, particularly in our high-tech industries. It leads us to pour desired outcomes into concrete, and make commitments based on achieving those outcomes. Plan for Success is the intellectual equivalent of: Make big bucks by winning fifteen consecutive hands of blackjack without taking any money off the table till the end. It works when it works, but leaves you in the lurch when it doesn’t (which is most of the time).

If you are going to build the Empire State Building, the first thing you need to do is dig a deep hole and pour a strong foundation. If you are going to build a home in the suburbs, all you need to do is pour a six-inch slab of concrete.

Men Are Sandcastles Men are sandcastles made out of pebbles and the bucket is the patriarchy: if you remove it, we fear we won´t be able to hold ourselves together, we pour cement in the gaps to fill the gaps to make ourselves concrete constructions.

...and after all, if I really wanted the bay to stay totally untouched, I wouldn't be living here myself, would I?" said her mother's voice out in the kitchen. I'd live in the city, and just enjoy the idea of the bay, pure and untouched between bare hills. But we built this house didn't we? We dug into the slope and levelled the space and poured the concrete foundations.

Men Are Sandcastles Men are sandcastles made out of pebbles and the bucket is patriarchy: if you remove it, we fear we won’t be able to hold ourselves together, we pour in cement to fill the gaps to make ourselves concrete constructions.

Bunyan points out, for example, how the Pharisees of Jesus’ day no doubt phrased their prayers well but were condemned because they fell short of “pouring out” their hearts to God (IWP, 38). Without help from the Holy Spirit in purifying and pouring out the heart, he writes, one who prays is “hyp- ocritical, cold, and unseemly” and “abominable to God” (IWP, 37). The hypocrisy God detests, then, is importantly not a matter of say- ing one thing and doing another, but of saying one thing and feeling another: of a disjunction between the logocentric intellect and the heart, between the propositional truths of abstract doctrine and the emotions which are substantively to mirror and confirm it.

Collin Boyd stepped off the Metro bus on his way to work, and across the street he saw himself strolling down the sidewalk. A stubborn but warm February rain was pouring hard across the concrete canyons of downtown. His foot

Collin Boyd stepped off the Metro bus on his way to work, and across the street he saw himself strolling down the sidewalk. A stubborn but warm February rain was pouring hard across the concrete

Consider it a moment. In celebration of the only spot where 4 states’ corners meet, we have poured upon it concrete and asphalt.

We are still young, but we have done something remarkable already. We have stayed together. I think where we find ourselves is extremely significant. Significant because the next seven years, I think, are going to be final in a way that the last seven have not. In the next seven years every one of us will be in our thirties, some nearing forty. We are already starting marriages, families, careers, and settling into cities. In the next seven years those things are going to become more and more entrenched. The concrete we’re pouring into the habits of our lives is going to dry, and we are going to become the kind of people that we’re going to be for a long, long time. Let me put it another way. The college years and the early twenties lend themselves to a kind of emotional radicalness where you actually can and do completely shift your habits, and we become new people. That window, however, is likely closing. Thus, I think now is the time to consider seriously what kinds of people we are becoming. We have a good start, but I think the next seven years will be far more determinative of what kinds of friends we will be in the long run. The next seven years will show: Will we have the kind of friendships that sustain us through rocky years in marriage? Maybe more important, will we have the kind of friendships that sustain us through the difficulties of not being married yet? Will we have the kind of friends who live as examples to one another’s kids? Will we be the kind of friends who support one another financially if a job or business falls through or support one another emotionally if we hit dead ends in our careers? Will we be the kind of friends who won’t ignore and won’t let one another get into bad emotional, physical, sexual, or financial habits? I think the summary of what I’m longing for, the reasons why I decided to write all this down, is I see the beginnings of a covenant between us. And I see the possibility of covenant relationships forming in the long run. And I want to name the goodness, to give words to what the Lord is doing among us. I want to call one another not simply by what we are but by what we are hoping to become. I think that might be “covenant friends.” I leave whatever form it takes to you, but what I hope is that we begin to think and talk of one another in these terms, in terms of covenant relationships, where we acknowledge that the Lord is binding us together in ways that we don’t have the option to separate. In conclusion, I think our next seven years may be our most important, and I want us to consider pushing into those years consciously, as covenant friends. It might go a long way toward what I hope for as our end. This is what I imagine: that in the long run we will look at one another and say, “I have a lot of friends, but none like you.

«Je suis arrivé à la conclusion que la clé de tout changement réussi est de placer les individus au cœur de celui-ci tout en prenant soin de bien transmettre le sentiment d’urgence en vue d’obtenir des résultats concrets et pertinents pour tous.»

This doesn’t mean the future is set or completely decided in advance. It’s more like concrete in its liquid state: it has been poured into a frame, but you can still make an imprint, shape it by your decisions.

Everything was an excuse. The felt so concrete, so real at the time. Now they are wispy, pathetic. I was terrified. If I participated in the world I moved closer to, then I would have to stomach the chance that I might fail at every task I tackled. I didn't want to fail at being Native. Being Native to me then meant not only having the experience of all of these cultural things, but also being decent at them. I wanted to feel a peace in myself that cultural things brought me, but I had never felt so out of my depth. Failure felt imminent. But I couldn't fail at something I never had the chance to try. So the excuses continued to pour from me, sweetly apologetic to hide the stench of the rotting fear that created them.

Five thousand tons of concrete were poured in horizontal layers on to wooden formwork, but at the top of the dome lightweight aggregates such as pumice and, more inventive still, empty amphorae (clay bottles used for shipping olive oil) were added to the concrete in place of stone in order to reduce the load. The inside of the dome was also coffered, which not only lightened the load still further but also added a decorative feature that has since been extensively imitated.

But basically, all he plans is to pour concrete over my life and construct a new building of his own design. But I'm not that kind of a person...

The Mantra of a concrete engineer is: you want foundations, we will pour you foundations; you want pillars, we will pour you pillars; you want a floor, we will pour you a floor; you want it twice the size? - no problem; you want it curved? - no problem.

A skyscraper is a tall building whose weight is supported by a frame of steel or poured-in-place concrete with steel reinforcements. Unlike the load-bearing walls of a masonry structure, walls do not help support the average skyscraper.

Technologiquement parlant , il s'agit pourtant du fruit de leur travail concret, mais dans le processus de production l'activité concrète ne vaut pour les producteurs que comme combustion indifférente et abstraite de leur énergie. En conséquence, aussi bien la "matière" à travailler que sa transformation concrète leur restent par essence indifférentes et étrangères, et ils ne peuvent s'identifier avec les objects qu'ils fabriquent, comme pouvait encore le faire l'artisan prémoderne.

I think about that every time I’m in an airport,” I tell her. “It’s one reason I love traveling so much.” I hesitate, searching for how to pour this long-steeping soupy thought into concrete words. “As a kid, I was a loner,” I explain, “and I always figured that when I grew up, I’d leave my hometown and discover other people like me somewhere else. Which I have, you know? But everyone gets lonely sometimes, and whenever that happens, I buy a plane ticket and go to the airport and—I don’t know. I don’t feel lonely anymore. Because no matter what makes all those people different, they’re all just trying to get somewhere, waiting to reach someone.

Men are sandcastles made out of pebbles and the bucket is patriarchy: if you remove it, we fear we won’t be able to hold ourselves together, we pour in cement to fill the gaps to make ourselves concrete constructions.

12. I wasn't just encased in hardening concrete up to my chin; it was pouring down my throat. I was in a race to see if I would die from the outside in or the inside out.

The river instantly resumed its thundering way toward the Salton Sea. Cory brought the river back under control on November 4 “by exhausting the capacities of every quarry between Los Angeles and Nogales, four hundred and eighty-five miles to the east.” Yet one month later, the river busted loose again. For Harry Cory, the sixth failed attempt to close the breach was the last straw. The Southern Pacific had poured more than a million dollars “into that hole” and the river had swept it all away. A sustainable repair required not only a dam, but the construction and permanent maintenance of fifteen miles of levees along the west bank, reinforced with concrete and steel to keep the river corralled even at its most violent. These would be the most expensive levees ever built over such a distance—not a job for the Southern Pacific, in his weary judgment. The railroad was the most resourceful, rich, and powerful enterprise in the Southwest, yet the river had brought it to its knees.

The whole world could be against your husband, but as long as you are for him, you give him wings. And if the whole world is for him, but you’re against him, it’s like pouring concrete in his shoes.

The funnel-shaped devices are tremie tubes, which are apparently being used to avoid having the wet concrete free fall into the forms where the 4-cubic-yard buckets could not fit to pour directly.

La condition du moine constitue une victoire sur l'espace et le temps, ou sur le monde et la vie, en ce sens que le moine se situe par son attitude au centre et dans le présent : au centre par rapport au monde plein de phénomènes, et dans le présent par rapport à la vie pleine d’évènements. Concentration de prière et rythme de prière: ce sont en un certain sens les deux dimensions de l'existence spirituelle en général et monastique en particulier. Le religieux s'abstrait du monde, il se fixe en un lieu défini et le lieu est centre parce qu'il est consacré à Dieu , il ferme moralement les yeux, et reste sur place en attendant la mort, comme une statue placée dans une niche, pour parler saint François de Sales ; par cette "concentration", le moine se situe sous l'axe divin, il participe déjà au Ciel en se rattachant concrètement à Dieu. Ce faisant, le contemplatif s'abstrait également de la durée, car par l'oraison - cette actualisation permanente de la conscience de Dieu - , il se situe dans un instant intemporel : l'oraison (ou le souvenir de Dieu) est maintenant et toujours, elle est "toujours maintenant" et appartient déjà l 'Éternité. La vie du moine, par l'élimination des mouvements désordonnés, est un rythme ; orl e rythme est la fixation d'un instant - ou du présent - dans la durée, comme l'immobilité est la fixation d'un point -ou du centre - dans l'étendue ; ce symbolisme fondé sur la loi de l'analogie devient concret en vertu de la consécration à Dieu.

Your wife?” “Right.” “What does she do?” Tracy asked. “She works for a janitorial company; they clean the buildings downtown.” “She works nights?” Kins said. “Yeah.” “Do you have kids?” Tracy asked. “A daughter.” “Who watches your daughter when you and your wife are working nights?” “My mother-in-law.” “Does she stay at your house?” Tracy said. “No, my wife drops her off on her way to work.” “So nobody was at home when you got there Sunday night?” Bankston shook his head. “No.” He sat up again. “Can I ask a question?” “Sure.” “Why are you asking me these questions?” “That’s fair,” Kins said, looking to Tracy before answering. “One of our labs found your DNA on a piece of rope left at a crime scene.” “My DNA?” “It came up in the computer database because of your military service. The computer generated it, so we have to follow up and try to get to the bottom of it.” “Any thoughts on that?” Tracy said. Bankston squinted. “I guess I could have touched it when I wasn’t wearing my gloves.” Tracy looked to Kins, and they both nodded as if to say, “That’s plausible,” which was for Bankston’s benefit. Her instincts were telling her otherwise. She said, “We were hoping there’s a way we could determine where that rope was delivered, to which Home Depot.” “I wouldn’t know that,” Bankston said. “Do they keep records of where things are shipped? I mean, is there a way we could match a piece of rope to a particular shipment from this warehouse?” “I don’t know. I wouldn’t know how to do that. That’s computer stuff, and I’m strictly the labor, you know?” “What did you do in the Army?” Kins asked. “Advance detail.” “What does advance detail do?” “We set up the bases.” “What did that entail?” “Pouring concrete and putting up the tilt-up buildings and tents.” “So no combat?” Kins asked. “No.” “Are those tents like those big circus tents?” Tracy asked. “Sort of like that.” “They still hold them up with stakes and rope?” “Still do.” “That part of your job?” “Yeah, sure.” “Okay, listen, David,” Tracy said. “I know you were in the police academy.” “You do?” “It came up on our computer system. So I’m guessing you know that our job is to eliminate suspects just as much as it is to find them.” “Sure.” “And we got your DNA on a piece of rope found at a crime scene.” “Right.” “So I have to ask if you would you be willing to come in and help us clear you.” “Now?” “No. When you get off work; when it’s convenient.” Bankston gave it some thought. “I suppose I could come in after work. I get off around four. I’d have to call my wife.” “Four o’clock works,” Tracy said. She was still trying to figure Bankston out. He seemed nervous, which wasn’t unexpected when two homicide detectives came to your place of work to ask you questions, but he also seemed to almost be enjoying the interaction, an indication that he might still be a cop wannabe, someone who listened to police and fire scanners and got off on cop shows. But it was more than his demeanor giving her pause. There was the fact that Bankston had handled the rope, that his time card showed he’d had the opportunity to have killed at least Schreiber and Watson, and that he had no alibi for those nights, not with his wife working and his daughter with his mother-in-law. Tracy would have Faz and Del take Bankston’s photo to the Dancing Bare and the Pink Palace, to see if anyone recognized him. She’d also run his name through the Department of Licensing to determine what type of car he drove. “What would I have to do . . . to clear me?” “We’d like you to take a lie detector test. They’d ask you questions like the ones we just asked you—where you work, details about your job, those sorts of things.” “Would you be the one administering the test?” “No,” Tracy said. “We’d have someone trained to do that give you the test, but both Detective Rowe and I would be there to help get you set up.” “Okay,” Bankston said. “But like I said, I have

J'ai connu des filles, en général plus jeunes, qui s'empressaient de se déshabiller comme pour prendre un bain, vous privaient des mystères qu'elles vous jetaient sans façon aux yeux, vous volent le spectacle, et le plaisir de les surprendre avec lenteur. Avec celles-là, tout est concret, à consommer sur-le-champ.

And the plunder was not just of Prince alone. Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuitions for Montessori and music lessons. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League... Think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry set, racetracks, and model trains. Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth.

Moreover, the new wealth the region now enjoys is convincing East Asians to revisit their ancient culture with fresh, more confident eyes. No longer does success automatically equate with westernization; East Asians are finding new value in their old practices, teachings, and traditions. “The 200 years of Western colonization and domination of Asia was like pouring concrete slabs over Asia’s history,” Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, and one of Asia’s most influential academics, told me over lunch in Beijing. “For Asia to modernize, Asia had to reject its past. Asia’s past was a burden so they focused on learning the best of the West. But now that they have succeeded, they are in a position to reengage with their past in a different way. You have to develop what I call ‘cultural confidence.’ What Asia is doing is finally drilling through those slabs and reconnecting back with its past. There will be a kind of cultural renaissance taking place in Asia.” He calls this trend “the most significant thing happening in Asia today.

De toute façon,à qoi ça sert d'avoir une bonne histoire à raconter si t'as personne pour la comprendre? La vieille casette du "J'ai mal, je suis fatiguée", ça passe plus. En général, le monde comprend juste ce qui est concret. Des blessures qui ont pas d'élément déclencheur, c'est du n'importe quoi. Quand on est la seule metteure en scène de sa propre comédie dramatique comme moi, on s'étouffe avec ses pensées parce les "Tu vas aller mieux, tu vas voir, suffit d'un peu de motivation", j'en ai ma claque. Y'a des trucs insondables dans l'âme...

Who were you before they touched you? Kissed your whole mouth clean? Pressed you into the quiet concave of The Earth? Pinned your wings there? I loved you before it happened. That soft un-stripping of yourself. How they poured concrete into your hollows. Pushed you into every river they could find." - "Feathers

Who were you before they touched you? Kissed your whole mouth clean? Pressed you into the quiet concave of The Earth? Pinned your wings there? I loved you before it happened. That soft un-stripping of yourself. How they poured concrete into your hollows. Pushed you into every river they could find." - "Feathers

After a couple of years seeing Joe’s truck, I was in my yard one day when I realized I needed some steps poured at the end of my driveway to make it easier to access my “writing shed.” A couple days later, I pulled into The Hungry Bear and wrote down Joe’s phone number. I was excited to speak with him. I could hardly contain my excitement over getting the chance to meet Joe. We spoke on the phone, and a couple of days later Joe the Concrete Guy was standing in my driveway. I couldn’t believe it! Yet I resisted the urge to ask for his autograph.

You see,” Joe continued, “all I do is concrete. It’s all I’ve ever done since my father taught me how to pour concrete in these mountains. And I learned a long time ago that if I am going to take care of my family, every time I walk onto someone’s property, my job is to look for every problem concrete can solve and let folks know I can solve it.

There were very few things to do in Toms River, New Jersey, however it was the closest thing resembling civilization near the school. When I wasn’t being restricted to the campus, for one infraction or another, that’s where I would go. Toms River was two and a half miles west of the school. Making the round trip was a five-mile walk, but it was worth it, just to get away. To get there I walked down Prospect Avenue, and then cut corners to Bayside Avenue. In the winter, the frozen snow and ice made the walk cold and miserable. There was always a wind blowing off the river, but I would trudge on relentlessly. The wet slush soaked through my shoes, ruining a shine I had worked on for hours. My feet became wet and frozen, but I pressed on regardless. Eventually I would reach Route 166, which was narrow and only had two lanes; still it was the only north-south highway along the coast at the time. I then crossed the concrete bridge that had a year engraved on it, indicating that it was built as a WPA project during the Great Depression. On the west side of the road was the Toms River Diner. It was classic in appearance and was a warm haven, where I could thaw out. Thelma, the waitress, was always friendly and one of the sexiest women I ever knew. She laughed at my silliness, knew just how much cleavage to show, and moved and turned like a fashion model. There was always “Country Music” playing, especially that of Hank Williams who was Thelma’s favorite. Hey, Good Lookin’, Your Cheatin’ Heart, and I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry were all songs he had written and that she sang along with. Thelma knew that I could not keep my eyes off of her, and she enjoyed playing the part, letting me look far down the unbuttoned section of her waitress uniform, while pouring me another cup of coffee. The way she looked over her shoulder, throwing aside her hair while asking what else I wanted, would send shivers down my back and feelings into my loins that set me on fire. Just this alone was worth the five-mile round trip. During warmer weather, the walk was more pleasant, but the constant wind off the Atlantic Ocean and the river, never let up.

LES TROIS CARACTÉRISTIQUES DU CERVEAU AUTISTIQUE Nous croyons qu’il y a trois caractéristiques communes à tous les autistes, peu importe leur degré d’atteinte et que l’autisme soit visible ou pas. Ce sont les suivantes. •​La difficulté d’initiative du cerveau, qui agit comme s’il avait toujours besoin d’un démarreur, d’un indicateur externe, pour déclencher son action, pour passer à une autre étape. Selon les degrés d’atteinte, la personne ne peut pas créer de liens par elle-même pour traverser la zone de développement suivante. •​La difficulté d’abstraction: le cerveau étant visuel et concret, l’autiste ne tient donc pas compte de l’invisible, ce qui comprend l’abstraction, l’interaction et le social. Le cerveau est connecté du côté perceptif, non social, ce qui fait de l’autiste un être «socialement aveugle». Les autistes ont la réputation d’être des visuels, mais la réalité est beaucoup plus complexe. •​La difficulté de rappeler l’information en temps réel, ou le délai de traitement même dans la description verbale des événements vécus qui peuvent être rapportés beaucoup plus tard que l’événement. Le cerveau n’arrive pas à traiter l’information associée à soi en temps réel. C’est pourquoi on entend souvent l’autiste répondre «je ne sais pas» quand on lui pose une question personnelle, qui touche son vécu. Cela fera aussi dire aux gens, à tort, que les autistes n’ont pas d’émotions.

Collin Boyd stepped off the Metro bus on his way to work, and across the street he saw himself strolling down the sidewalk. A stubborn but warm February rain was pouring hard across the concrete canyons of downtown. His foot had landed ankle-deep in a drainage puddle, and his half-broken umbrella wasn't extending as it should. But the umbrella, which had

We have resolved to know nothing but Christ and Him crucified. All revelation and experience flow out of this fountain. O the depths and the riches! God has forever poured Himself out in a concrete act of assuming our human nature and redeeming mankind completely from depravity, decay and alienation. This was not a limited act for a select few. For God was in Christ reconciling the cosmos to Himself (2 Cor. 5:19). There is no limited atonement any more than there is a limited incarnation. Fully man for all of humanity. Christ plunged headlong into the human condition. Sinless though He was, He assumed fallen flesh like ours at its most corrupted level. He baptized that same humanity in His death and brought it back to life in the will of the Father and the power of Holy Spirit. Such a mystical connection we have! Christ wove mankind into the Trinitarian life – there is forever a resurrected human being sitting in the middle of the Godhead. And there we sit in Him, fully united to God in heavenly places. In assuming the human form, He assumed and included all of humanity into Himself. As early Church father Gregory Nazianzen says, “the unassumed is the unredeemed.” And we know from the apostle Paul that “as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22).

If there are rules against taking advantage of resident aliens, then why are so many Christians the first to call for deportation of migrants? It’s as if we expect these strangers to provide us with cheap manual labor, roofing our houses, landscaping our yards, pouring concrete, and caring for our children, but then we want them to disappear after sundown.

George could dig and pour the concrete basement for a house. He could saw the lumber and nail the frame. He could wire the rooms and fit the plumbing. He could hang the drywall. He could lay the floors and shingle the roof. He could build the brick steps. He could point the windows and paint the sashes. But he could not throw a ball or walk a mile; he hated exercise, and once he took early retirement at sixty he never had his heart rate up again if he could help it, and even then only if it were to whack through some heavy brush to get to a good trout pool. Lack of exercise might have been the reason that, when he had his first radiation treatment for the cancer in his groin, his legs swelled up like two dead seals on a beach and then turned as hard as lumber. Before he was bedridden, he walked as if he were an amputee from a war that predated modern prosthetics; he tottered as if two hardwood legs hinged with iron pins were buckled to his waist. When his wife touched his legs at night in bed, through his pajamas, she thought of oak or maple and had to make herself think of something else in order not to imagine going down to his workshop in the basement and getting sandpaper and stain and sanding his legs and staining them with a brush, as if they belonged to a piece of furniture. Once, she snorted out loud, trying to stifle a laugh, when she thought, My husband, the table. She felt so bad afterward that she wept.

It stood on the edge of the Boston Post Road, two small structures of glass and concrete forming a semicircle among the trees: the cylinder of the office and the long, low oval of the diner, with the gasoline pumps as the colonnade of a forecourt between them. It was a study in circles; there were no angles and no straight lines; it looked like shapes caught in a flow, held still at the moment of being poured, at the precise moment when they formed a harmony that seemed too perfect to be intentional. It looked like a cluster of bubbles hanging low over the ground,

A stubborn but warm February rain was pouring hard across the concrete canyons of downtown. His foot had landed ankle-deep in a drainage puddle, and his half-broken umbrella wasn't extending as it should. But the umbrella, which had rarely seen use, quickly fell out of his hands